The Health Department is all set to launch the first ever epidemiological surveillance study covering one million people in the State - about three per cent of the population - to collect baseline data on health behaviours, mortality, and morbidity burden.
Till now, all of the State’s projections on its increasing morbidity of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) have been extrapolations of small population-based sample studies. This lack of concrete data has been adversely affecting the planning, execution, and evaluation of various health programmes.
“The department has already charted out its agenda for the next five years in various health sectors, with specific goals and targets, based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Strategies and plan of action have been drawn up for achieving each of these SDGs. The basic purpose of this baseline data study is to assess where we stand right now as far as each of these SDG target areas are concerned, so that at the end of five years (2020), we would have a clear picture of what changes we have been able to achieve, through our health interventions,” a health official said.
The study, titled Kerala Health Surveillance Programme, will collect information on the individual risk factors (tobacco, alcohol, diet, physical activity), incidence of NCDs, hospitalisations, deaths in families of one million individuals in approximately 2.5 lakh households in all 14 districts over a period of 18 months.
Trained health workers will do the data collection, using tablets on which a detailed questionnaire has been entered. The data collection will be supervised by a medical officer in every cluster and the data entered into a central server of the State Data Cell.
As part of the study, a sub-set of one lakh population, who are already suffering from lifestyle diseases, will be screened afresh for various parameters and their data entered for evaluation and analysis.
The entire study is being funded by the State and implemented by the State NCD division. Core groups, including statisticians, epidemiologists, data analysis experts, have been evaluating and ensuring data quality.
The study will be repeated in 2021, to observe if the intervention strategies of the government in the interim have been effective.
The Population Health Research Institute, Hamilton Health Sciences and McMaster University, Canada, headed by Salim Yusuf, president of the World Heart Federation and a renowned global epidemiology research leader, is providing the technical support, training and software for the study.
