29th July 2016 Community nurses, health officers and doctors from health centers in Tongatapu are learning the easier ways to apply health care to people suffering from NCDs in a two-day workshop at Basilica Conference Room.
Community Health Supervisor, Dr. Lemisio Sa’ale said Package of Essential NCD Interventions for Primary Health Care provided guidelines for nurses and doctors about the ways to maintain NCDs.
“PEN provides guideline for us in the maintenance of NCDs which includes screening, testing, and the negative effects including the different types of medications for its prevalence.”
Dr Sa’ale said the statistics from the past six years showed people suffering from NCDs were still rising.
“The out-patient at the seven centers within Tongatapu is approximately 3,000 and within the Diabetic clinic at Vaiola there are 4,000-5,000 patients with NCDs.”
Dr Sa’ale stated that the establishment of health centers minimized complications in dealing with a large group of people at Vaiola Hospital, making resources available for the community with the help of NCDs nurses and health officers.
“We are trying our best to provide our services out to the communities to lessen the problem and that is having the Health Officers and NCD Nurses within the seven centres fully equipped with resources including transportation for home visit.”
“That’ll make it easier for the patient to just seek our health centers for medical advices while those who’re in a most critical conditions are being referred back to us at Vaiola. However, specialists from Vaiola do visit these centers monthly to inspect what is being done and what is needed to be done.”
World Health Organization Suva-based Consultant Dr. Francisca Cuevas said this was Tonga’s second training on PEN and this was more detailed, eliminating people who do not need to be screened and clarifying those needed to proceed to the next level.
Dr Cuevas said the training was on a clinical protocol in identifying people who were at high risk of developing the diseases because at times some people do not have the symptoms and therefore would not go to the clinic for check-up.
“The approach of PEN is to detect them early by doing some screening at the community level with people who’re eligible and most likely to have the diseases. Because when you get the patients quite late then it may difficult for them to leave the hospital,” she said.
PEN was a conceptual framework for strengthening equity and efficiency of primary health care in low-resource settings; it identifies core technologies, medicines and risk prediction tools; discusses protocols required for implementation of a set of essential NCD interventions; develops technical and operational outline for integration of essential NCD interventions into primary care and for evaluation of impact.
ENDS
Issued by the: Ministry of Meteorology, Energy, Information, Disaster Management, Environment, Climate Change and Communications