About
About the Book
The aim of Non-communicable Disease Prevention: Best Buys, Wasted Buys, and Contestable Buys is to offer NCD program managers and policy makers, operating in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), new ways of thinking when assessing and implementing NCD prevention interventions (coined ‘buys’ in this book).
Management of NCDs is no easy endeavor, and NCD program managers and policy makers have to navigate through challenges of budget constraints, lack of political will, industry pressures, information and capacity barriers, and other health care priorities taking precedence.
For example, keeping up-to-date on healthcare information can be tricky. Every day, 75 trials and 11 systematic reviews are published. NCD program managers have to find ways of determining the information most relevant to them. Establishing an expert hub can be a means of collecting and reviewing the latest information and to also produce health technology assessment evidence.
The book does not offer a magic bullet for NCD control and prevention nor does it offer a repository of best buy interventions. Instead of providing answers, the book offers questions that the target audience can consider, specifically the contextual ones. Context is key and what may work in one setting by no means is guaranteed to work in another. The book maintains that the success of an intervention lies in being able to respond to the local needs and environment. The road to success is almost certain to be unique to each jurisdiction. Within this book, there are 10 chapters discussing key themes of “political economy”, “transferability”, “health technology assessment”, and “priority setting”.
The online book will be launched on 12th December 2019 on this website - you will not want to miss it! The hard copy book will be launched at the Prince Mahidol Award Conference (PMAC) 2020.
PMAC was first organized in 2007 as a platform to convene experts to discuss pressing public health issues. PMAC honors the Royal Highness Prince Mahidol of Songkla regarded as Father of Modern Medicine and Public Health of Thailand. The late prince dedicated his life work to improving the health of the Thai population. Following the 10th anniversary of the conference, the organizers aspired to commission knowledge products in recognition of the work of the late prince and to preserve the legacy of PMAC.
About the Project
NCD Prevention: Best Buys, Wasted Buys, and Contestable Buys is commissioned by PMAC and is supported by the Thai Health Promotion Foundation (ThaiHealth) and the International Decision Support Initiative (iDSI)
This work is one of the first projects commissioned by the PMAC organizing committee. When preparing for the PMAC 2019 conference named “The Political Economy of NCDs: A Whole of Society Approach”, discussions at a preparatory meeting centred on the underutilization of cost-effective NCD prevention interventions being a huge barrier to the achievement of the global NCD targets. Dr. Yot Teerawattananon, founding leader of the Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program (HITAP), raised the other side of the coin, the contribution of wastage and inefficiency to the insufficient global progress in NCD control and prevention, as well as in other areas of health. HITAP, in collaboration with iDSI, have found that low-value health care interventions are a significant contributor to wasteful health spending, especially in LMICs. Given that there are opportunity costs for the choices we make in healthcare, more needs to be done by the global community to eliminate waste. It was therefore recommended that PMAC take a lead and bring this issue the fore.
NCD Prevention: Best Buys, Wasted Buys, and Contestable Buys was born. The concept note, developed by the project team, was accepted by the PMAC organizing committee in Tokyo in May 2018.
Contributors
Who are the project team you might ask? Collaboration is at the heart of this project and this work has brought together chapter teams from North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia with a wealth of expertise in: health economics, health policy, political economy, public health practice, and NCDs, among many other important fields.
Please see ‘Meet the Team’ for further information.
The project also owes its achievements to a team of high-level experts and supporters from across the world that have reviewed and provided feedback on the preliminary findings of the work.
To inform the findings, the project team circulated a call for the submission of LMIC-focused case studies of Best Buy, Wasted Buy, or Contestable Buy interventions for the prevention of NCDs. We were delighted to receive 58 case examples from 30 countries demonstrating the timely and widespread issue this evidence package tackles.
