Backgroud
Sri Lanka is a developing and multiracial country, located in the Indian ocean near the equator, with a population of approximately 20 million. It has a parliamentary democratic system of government and over 80% of hospitals belong to government and medical services are free of charge. Literacy rate of Sri Lanka is higher than the neighbouring countries of the region, and the government's health policies, based on the promotion of Maternal & Child and Geriatric health, are on the way to success.
According to the Health Master Plan (HMP) by the Ministry of Healthcare & Nutrition (MOH&N) ,the health problems in this country are classified into three categories based on epidemiological and medical economics:
i) Continuing Problems such as dengue fever, ii) Emerging Problems such as HIV/AIDS, and iii) Evolving Problems such as lifestyle-related diseases.
It is apprehensive thatthe health conditions and economics of individual Sri Lankan and Nation's economics will be compelled to face the multiple burdens in the near future.
JICA's Technical Support (JTS)
JTS on the first prevention against non-communicable diseases (NCDs) has been already startedby JICA after receiving the request by the government of Sri Lanka in order to avoid the catastrophic situations pointed out by HMP. Futhermore, the trend analyses on the data of inpatients suffered 59 types of communicable or NCDs from 1983 to 2003 were performedto propose the tagets and contents of the new JTS. As a result, ffifteen diseases were statistically significant, and nine out of the above15 cases were NCDs.
Because lifestyle-related diseases such as ischemic heart disease, cardiovascular diseases occupy four positions out of five leading causes of death in recent past of Sir Lanka, new model system which combines the first prevention and screening of high-risk persons and early treatment system was proposed to MOH&N.
The flow of the basic model projiect, composed of two screening steps to detect thespecific persons having high-risks such as obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol, etc., is classified into three groups to receive optimum healthcare sevices at the nearby hospitals.
Fortunately, MOH&N made a request for the new JTS based on this proposal to the government of Japan. Consequently, the budget of this project proposal was approved and is now under the practical arrangements by JICA.