Govt to treat 75 mn people with non-communicable diseases by 2025

The Union Health Ministry on Wednesday announced an ambitious plan of providing standard treatment to 75 million people with diabetes and hypertension by 2025, which would require the government to scale up its current level of offering such treatments by more than eight times within the next two years.

This, according to the officials, would be done using a network of 1.5 lakh health and wellness centres that will dispense the medicines, once doctors at primary health centres diagnose a patient and make the prescription.

“It will be the world’s largest expansion of the non-communicable disease in primary health care programmes,” V K Paul, Member (Health) at Niti Ayog said here launching the programme. Nearly 40,000 primary health care medical officers will be trained on standard treatment workflow for such diseases to realise the goals set for the programme.

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As per a World Health Organisation’s 2018 report on India’s non-communicable diseases (NCD) profile, such lifestyle diseases are estimated to account for 63% of all deaths in India of which cardiovascular diseases lead to 27% of overall mortality caused followed by chronic respiratory diseases (11%), cancers (9%), diabetes (3%) and others (13%).

A Union government-funded programme currently offers hypertension treatment to 6.2 million and diabetes to 2.6 million. Taken together, more than 8.8 million Indians receive NCD treatment from the government, which now plans to offer the same to 75 million persons.

“This is an ambitious goal, but a goal that is very much achievable using a primary health care approach,” said Poonam Khetrapal Singh, Regional Director, WHO South-East Asia Region.

While the plan does not specify the amount of money the central and state governments have to share for the rollout, it does cater to equipping the NCD clinics at district and sub-district levels after independent studies revealed the shortcomings of primary and community health centres in managing the non-communicable diseases.

“A comprehensive package of medicines, technologies and human resources to deliver services for the three major NCDs (excluding cancer) still eludes India,” the Indian Council of Medical Research said in a recent study.

Paul urged the state teams to improve the screening at the grass root level and to ensure that at least 80% of the diagnosed people are under treatment.

“The outcome budget document of Union Budget 2023-2024 has for the first time introduced hypertension and diabetes treatment as output indicators reflecting the government’s commitment to scale-up hypertension and diabetes coverage services,” he added.