(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) Barbados Chief Medical Officer, Dr Joy St John, on Tuesday, challenged a group of high profile focal points on chronic diseases prevention to put their noses to the grind and complete the strategic plan of action on Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases for the Caribbean (CNCD).
The NCD focal points are meeting in Barbados for two days (24 -25 November) to fine-tune a draft regional Strategic plan on Non-Communicable Disease Prevention and Control. The workshop is organised by the CARICOM Secretariat in tandem with the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), with support from Spain and is being facilitated by Dr Alafia Samuels, CARICOM Consultant on Chronic Disease Prevention.
Dr. St John, who declared the two-day workshop open, outlined three major reasons for the urgency in completing the plan. According to her, the plan would allow for Member States to have a consensus approach to the prevention and control of chronic NCDs; secondly, the plan, she said, would facilitate effective monitoring and evaluation and thirdly, she said the plan would give Member States a louder voice for change and help countries to fully adopt the commitment signalled by the Head of Governments through the Port- of- Spain Declaration.
“Indeed, the Region has the opportunity to be a model of success with CNCD prevention and control on the international stage,” she said.
The Barbados CMO acknowledged the gains made by CARICOM in focussing consistently on actions to prevent and control NCDs, but hastened to point out that there was still much more work to be done.
In the Caribbean, where NCDs is the second leading cause of death, one in ten adults has Chronic NCDs and this is expected to increase to one in five to six adults by the year 2030.
The race, Dr. St John said, was not a sprint but a marathon and therefore a range of strategies was urgently needed to address the underlying conditions that lead to the development of Chronic NCDs.
Noting that resources for health issues were limited especially in the face of competing priorities, Dr. St John urged the Community to redouble its efforts to be more strategic in its thinking and provide ongoing leadership to ensure the success of the programme to fight NCDs.
She further urged the CARICOM Secretariat Health Desk to continue to be proactive by providing leadership, technical expertise, monitoring and evaluation for the implementation of the strategic plan.
“It is my hope that we will be able to complete the tasks which are before us in a timely manner and that our participation in these deliberations will be a source of mutual support and will strengthen our commitment to work for healthier communities, healthier countries and healthier Caribbean region,” she concluded.
The two-day workshop comes against the background of the CARICOM Heads of Government’s commitment to support strategies to stop the epidemic of Chronic NCDS. This commitment is implicit in what is now known as the Port-of-Spain Declaration arising out of the landmark Summit on Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) held on 15 September 2007 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.
One of the 15 point tenets of the Declaration had called for continued support of Heads of Government “for CARICOM and PAHO as the joint Secretariat …. to be the entity responsible for revision of the regional plan for the prevention and control of NCDs, and the monitoring and evaluation of the Port-of-Spain Declaration.
