Chronic Disease Prevention and Management

What is Chronic Disease, prevention and management?

The links between a healthy community and a productive nation are well established. It is also well established that there are a number of social and economic factors that shape health. Chronic disease prevention is an approach to health care that emphasises helping individuals maintain independence and stay as healthy as possible. The system to prevent chronic diseases may be best understood as a continuum of care. This care continuum ranges from prevention strategies directed at minimising or eliminating future chronic illnesses with initiatives like smoking cessation, healthy eating and physical activity programs to actual health care delivery where patients are encouraged to take an active role in their own care and health care providers are supported with the necessary resources and expertise to better assist their patients in managing their health.

Prevention strategies should consider underlying influences on health inequalities such as education, income distribution, public safety, housing, work environment, employment, social networks, and transportation among others. It is important that strategies be aimed at reducing overall population risk while simultaneously reducing the gap among different population groups. In many instances, this requires a redesign and an evaluation of interventions of well documented efficacy.

Primary health care is a key setting for health promotion and illness prevention activity. Australians regularly attend their general practice and this setting is well placed to play an expanded role in a national prevention agenda. This can be facilitated by enhancing practice capacity to engage in prevention and linking primary health care initiatives with broader community prevention initiatives. This will require practitioner and practice level incentives for prevention and other enablers such as voluntary patient registration and capacity to implement regional intersectoral partnerships between local government,  general practice networks, business and community organisations for prevention and promote a more systematic approached to reducing the barriers and increasing the enablers to healthy lifestyle choices.