A year after adopting the global non-communicable diseases (NCD) monitoring framework by including ten targets to be achieved by 2025 at the World Health Assembly, India will soon initiate nationwide survey to assess key behavioral risk factors and health facilities available to tackle the diseases to enable it to reach the targets committed at the global forum.
India has already formulated national action plan for the prevention and Control of NCDs by including these targets and their 21 indicators to be achieved by 2025. India is the first country to adopt the global NCD monitoring framework.
The need for framework has been felt urgently as NCDs are contributing to rising proportion of sickness and deaths worldwide, including India. These include heart diseases, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, cancer, obesity, chronic lung diseases and others.
These are caused by several risk factors mainly tobacco and alcohol consumption, inappropriate diet and physical inactivity, air pollution and stress among others, said an official from the Union Health Ministry.
Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has been identified as the nodal agency for the NCD surveillance.
“This will generate country/national level estimates of key NCD related indicators (risk factors and health system response) identified in the national NCD monitoring framework for 2015, create a central and regional pool of resources (protocols, standard tools, training manuals, etc) to support conduct of similar surveys at State level,” said the official.
The survey also aims to strengthen capacities for monitoring of NCDs at national and sub-national level. “It will enable assessment of progress on some of the targets being made at the country level towards achieving them by 2025 through repeat surveys.
“The survey will be done on a nationally representative population sample drawn from various regions of the country, and will include interviews with people aged 15-69 years in urban and rural areas,” the official added.
In 2011, the UN High level Meeting on Prevention and Control of NCDs had requested member countries to implement strategies to reduce NCDs and their risk factors. Two years later, the World Health Assembly proposed 9 global voluntary NCDs targets along with 25 indicators to be achieved by member countries by year 2025 keeping the year 2010 as baseline for assessing progress.