Govt standardising treatment plan for diabetes patients

– same to be done for other chronic NCDs

Medical practitioners from various regions across Guyana are being trained on a series of new standards that will guide their treatment of diabetes patients – a programme that the Government is hoping to emulate in the treatment of other chronic Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs).
The Health Ministry, in collaboration with experts from the US-based Mount Sinai Group, on Wednesday introduced Standard Diabetes Guidelines for Primary Healthcare. These are a series of treatment plans for the various stages of diabetes, which will be revised and upgraded every two years.

According to Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony, the aim is to have a unified and standard way of effectively treating patients so as to avoid complications. One of the complications from diabetes is kidney failure and right now, there are some 330 persons currently on dialysis in Guyana owing to kidney failure.
Dr Anthony outlined that this number could be reduced in the future with better treatment and management of chronic non-communicable diseases such as diabetes. This, he noted, can be achieved by standardising the treatment plan since many physicians across the country have different approaches to treating diabetes patients rather than using medication on the national list.
“So, it’s not a problem getting the medication but it’s a problem when you are using things that are outside of that list. And very often we see people ignore medication that can offer the same type of help to the patient and prescribe something totally different… but are patients ready for that? And so, we thought long and hard about this and that is why you would see in these guidelines, what are the things that you should be used as first-time treatment, what are the things you should escalate to when you’re not getting good glucose control and so forth,” he explained.
The Health Minister implored those practitioners undergoing training to ensure they use these newly-introduced guidelines in their treatment plan. This way, he said, patients would not be burdened to find the medication privately.
However, if it is found that there are more effective drugs on the market to treat patients, then Minister Anthony noted that they could be considered and go through the process to get on the national medication list.
The one-day training targeted medical personnel from various regions across the country so that these new guidelines would not be only introduced in certain parts of the country.
“We want whatever we’re doing to be at scale and it must be across the country… And that is why we brought people from every single region to be here. Now, because we couldn’t bring all the medical staff from the particular region is that when you go back, you have to do a similar workshop and work with the doctors, the nurses and other caregivers in your region so that you can disseminate these guidelines to them,” he stated.
Meanwhile, the Consultant from the Mount Sinai health team, Dr David Heller, said Guyanese health workers will learn the key methods of how to implement the guidelines in the simplest way.
“The goal really is to help you to feel like you know what you need to know, not just about the guidelines but about how to teach them,” the consultant told the healthcare workers at the training.
In fact, Dr Anthony posited that introducing the new treatment guidelines is not the only part of the programme as work will also have to be done to ensure these are implemented in every region.
Dr Anthony further pointed out that this new standardizing initiative is part of a larger effort to build stronger surveillance systems for chronic non-communicable diseases and will see similar guidelines being introduced for other chronic diseases.
“We need to have a surveillance system where we can monitor the different types of chronic diseases… Before, our emphasis was on infectious diseases and not so much on chronic non-communicable diseases… But under this programme, we want to look at all the chronic non-communicable diseases, starting with diabetes… We’re also looking at cancers, we want to do cardiovascular diseases, kidney diseases and so on but we’re not there yet.”
“And as we roll this [Standard Diabetes Guidelines] out, by next year we want to piggyback on the system we built here to do maybe some of the other chronic diseases and then over time we’ll be able to do all of them and change how we’re managing [the diseases],” he stated.
While this programme is being executed, the Health Minister is working on enhancing service delivery at health centres across the country, equipping these facilities with the tools and capacity needed to manage chronic diseases at a primary healthcare level.
“What you’re going to be part of is not just managing one disease, but it’s a system of how we want to transform the programmes that we have in the ministry so that we can have a better outcome with patients… We’re looking to develop a programme where we can keep people well for a longer period… The new shift in thinking is not just about increasing a person’s life expectancy alone but also increasing their health span so that they can live healthier for a longer period,” Minister Anthony stated.
Meanwhile, during Wednesday’s training, each region received machines to help in the advancement of the Standard Diabetes Guidelines as well as to help manage hypertension treatment.