In recent years, India has faced a rapid increase in urbanisation and industrialisation. A shift from a rural lifestyle to an urban lifestyle is often accompanied by reduced physical activity, a nutritionally poor calorie dense diet, mental stress etc - factors that are likely to enhance the risk for the development of diabetes.There is an urgent need to raise the level of awareness both among the community health care personnel and the lay public in order to strengthen the prevention of diabetes and its complications, thereby improving the quality of life for people living with diabetes as well as reducing the risk of premature death.The main objective of this project is to implement a diabetes prevention programme. This will be reached by creating awareness about the lifestyle risk for diabetes and related NCDs and focusing on early detection of diabetes and its complications.
All India Institute of Diabetes and Research (AIIDR) is implementing this project in the Gujarat State in India – a state with a high and growing burden of diabetes associated problems. The project will partner with the sister organisation the Yash Diabetes Specialities Centre Private Limited, which will provide technical support. The AIIDR will also involve local NGOs, associations, private companies and educational institutions in the project – and thereby broaden and secure a wider community ownership and involvement to secure longer term sustainability. A comprehensive awareness campaign will be initiated targeting the general public in the first phase of the project. The campaigns will run throughout the whole project period and will be intense, highly visible and use different kinds of approaches to reach out to the audience e.g. TV, radio, printed material, bill boards, exhibition etc. to reach out to as many people as possible, both to literate and as well as illiterate people.Messages through TV and radio will reach out to the illiterate part of the population in Gujarat State and inform people about diabetes in general. The time and venue for the upcoming screening camp will also be announced. Besides, the literate part of the population will receive information through print media - news papers and education material disseminated as pamphlets, posters, booklets, flash cards and CDs. Moreover, bill boards will be placed on major cross roads and a public exhibition lasting two days focusing on several aspects of diabetes will be planned once a year.By using these different approaches to inform people of diabetes and its risk factors, it is expected that the general knowledge of diabetes and sensitivity to a healthy lifestyle will increase. Health care professionals (HCP) in form of general practitioners, medical officers, nurses, dieticians, diabetologists and diabetes educators already involved in the diabetes field, will participate in seminars and workshops. The training of the HCP is performed through a seminar consisting of two sessions for doctors and one seminar for other HCP. After completed training, the HCP will share their training experiences with their colleagues, train their team members and disseminate important messages learnt at the sessions.One of the main responsibilities of the newly trained HCP is to organise awareness and screening camps at clinics, hospitals and at schools. The camps in the schools are aimed at educating teachers, children and parents and train them to enhance awareness about diabetes in their social network. The aim of the camps is to increase the participants’ basic knowledge about diabetes and will mainly focus on informing about diabetes in general, risk factors, consequences, complications, prevention, lifestyle modifications and encourage people to be aware of preventative behaviour and on early signs of diabetes. People detected with high risk of developing diabetes or people actually detected with diabetes will be offered a physical examination, an examination for complications and counselling on lifestyle modification. Lastly they will be referred for appropriate treatment. The camps will be organised once every fortnight.In order to enhance the probabilities for successful lifestyle alteration, yoga will be used as a tool in achievement of this goal. Yoga is in the Indian culture believed to have a healing effect on some of the risk factors for diabetes. Volunteers from the community will therefore be trained in conducting training sessions for people in yoga together with other related lifestyle modification activities.All health care personnel, teachers, school children and volunteers trained and educated during the project period will continue to act as ambassadors in the community and continue to raise awareness about diabetes even after project completion.
- 1,458 doctors trained in early detection and proper management of diabetes- 4,792 health care providers trained in diabetes management- 174 awareness camps conducted- 41,490 people screened for diabetes- 8,304 people with diabetes screened for complications- 91 television and 6 radio campaigns conducted- More than 20 million people reached through awareness campaigns