Jamaica’s Ministry of Health and Wellness aims to realign its health education and promotion infrastructure to place greater focus on the preventive rather than the curative aspect of health care.
CAPTION: “Jamaica must shift health care towards prevention,” says Dunstan Bryan.
The objective is to more effectively address the problem of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) among the Jamaican population, including diabetes and hypertension.
Permanent Secretary in the Ministry Dunstan Bryan has said that a properly resourced and realigned health education and promotion programme is critical in this regard.
“When we look at what is required, we see that prevention rests in health promotion and education, whether we are talking about primary prevention, secondary prevention or tertiary prevention.”
He said that NCDs are becoming a major public health burden, noting the need to change people’s behaviour to cauterise the problem.
“If we are to stop the trend of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, cancers, all of those NCDs; if we are to stop the trend of communicable diseases, dengue and HIV, prevention must be the priority action that we utilise,” he contended.
“When you look at the sick profile in Jamaica, in 10 years, no matter how many hospitals we build, we cannot accommodate the number of people that we have that are going to turn up at our hospitals with all of these diseases and therefore, we have to recalibrate.”
He also called for more devolution of health care delivery as an important component of the realignment.
Advocacy Action: Many countries talk about the need to shift the emphasis but find it enormously difficult. Have you seen such a shift in your health care system? Can you offer advice to others on the barriers, challenges and opportunities?