India Health Progress (IHP) and Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease (PFCD) will be hosting a roundtable conference on ‘Non-communicable disease (NCD) burden in India, sharing best practices to tackle India’s chronic disease burden’, on May 17, 2012 at The Park Hotel, Chennai.

The conference wants to combat the rise of NCDs, their impact on urban and rural Indians and on India’s productivity while seeking ways to tackle this chronic disease burden. Indians are susceptible to four major NCDs: cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancer, and chronic lung diseases.

Aman Gupta, principal advisor, IHP said, “NCDs not only afflict the general populace, but also affect national productivity, particularly when people in the productive age group fall ill. Since NCDs are preventable, attention should be focused on increasing awareness among all stakeholders and the general public, so that disease rates are brought down. Preventive measures could help free up immense resources that are otherwise channeled into curative therapies, tools and facilities.”

From government strategies to best practices in cardiology, oncology, diabetes and hepatitis, industry experts will discuss some of the best practices and preventive measure that can be put in place to mitigate NCD prevalence.

Faced with the complexity of problems in addressing NCDs, the organizers believe it is best to enlist the support of various stakeholders in combating such diseases. Deliberations and recommendations from healthcare experts at the roundtable will thereafter be compiled in a report and presented to the Government and healthcare authorities.

Kevin Walker, executive director, PFCD, said, “In addressing the NCD threat, preventive steps are important because direct benefits apart, the indirect gains would include lower employee absenteeism resulting in increased productivity and higher GDP growth. Besides, the benefits from lower death and disease rates simply cannot be quantified in pure monetary terms. Events such as these help maintain the focus on the dangers of NCDs, which otherwise can be easily ignored or underestimated.”

IHP seeks to bring together all likeminded entities and experts – doctors, healthcare spokespersons, opinion leaders and policy-makers – to address longstanding issues of healthcare and its inaccessibility in India. IHP therefore organizes periodic expert roundtables to facilitate relevant policy reforms and propel healthcare issues into public consciousness.