Video: Different Countries, Similar Challenges on Addressing NCDs

In many ways, people live very different lives in Bahia, Brazil, Minneapolis, Minnesota, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and Rajasthan, India.

But many people in all of these places have diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic, non-communicable diseases (NCDs). NCDs don’t get the headlines that epidemics such as Zika and ebola do, but as a group they accounted for 70 percent of global deaths in 2015, according to the World Health Organization.

HealthRise is a five-year, $17 million global effort to reduce premature deaths from NCDs in the U.S., Brazil, India, and South Africa. Abt Associates leads Healthrise’s global and country level programs and partners on the project with Medtronic Foundation and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

HealthRise is working on the front lines to ensure that health professionals have the skills and tools to detect and care for NCDs.

Video Interviews Show Health Care Workers’ Challenges, Achievements

To learn more about HealthRise’s impact and the critical role of frontline health workers, the project interviewed patients and health workers: community health workers, nurses, and physicians.

Patients spoke about the challenges of managing chronic conditions, including delays and limited medical supplies. The health workers talked about the challenges they face in addressing NCDs, including how far their patients live from health centers and community resistance to outreach about health services.

But the health workers also said that HealthRise has helped them improve their NCD diagnosis and treatment skills and to communicate more effectively with patients.

“Before HealthRise, no one knew about diabetes and hypertension in the villages and mountain areas,” said a community health worker in Udaipur, India. “Our knowledge increased by working with HealthRise.”

Watch the HealthRise video interviews.

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