At the Joint Forum Economic and Pacific Health Ministers Meeting held in 2014, the ministers endorsed the Pacific NCD Roadmap, which provided specific policy, regulatory and tax measures that could be implemented by PICTs to address NCDs. To monitor progress on the implementation of the roadmap, the Pacific Monitoring Alliance for NCD Action (MANA) developed the Pacific NCD Dashboard using a ‘traffic light’ rating scheme to track. The Dashboard covers 31 indicators across the areas of leadership and governance, prevention policies, health system response programmes, and routine monitoring. In 2017–2018, the Pacific MANA Coordination Team collaborated with national NCD focal points to complete country dashboards for all PICTs. The findings formed the baseline status of NCD policy and legislations in these respective PICTs; which was presented and endorsed at the 2018 Pacific Heads of Health meeting. (Read more)
SPC is leading a training programme designed to build capacity of health professionals from the French-speaking PICTs (New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna, French Polynesia and Vanuatu). The programme consisted of modules designed to improve participants’ skills in managing health promotion projects that target NCDs: implementation of interventions, monitoring and evaluation. (Read more)
Inaugural Workshop: In February 2018, the University of Queensland led by Dr Owain Williams, in partnership with SPC facilitated the inaugural Pacific Health Governance Research Network workshop in Brisbane. It was aimed at identifying research needs, gaps and priorities for the Pacific communities under four thematic areas: (i) Health systems and Universal Health; (ii) Health Systems and Universal Health; (iii) Climate Change, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and (iv) Non-communicable Diseases, nutrition and food security. Several lessons were learned at this workshop along with the identification of key research priorities under each of the thematic areas. (Read more – link to workshop report)
Workshop 2: A second workshop was held in Nadi in February 2019, co-hosted by SPC, University of Queensland and the Fiji National University. Health Security was the new addition to the thematic areas for this round. Each area was devoted half-day of plenary during which talanoa sessions were convened to explore opportunities for partnership. The NCD team co-facilitated the NCD, Nutrition and Food Security Stream for during this workshop.
Many of the breakout sessions saw the development of proposals and opportunities for continued research collaborations between partners. The SPC-NCD Team has partnered with Professor Amanda Lee from the School of Public Health at the University of Queensland to look at ‘A Structured approach to food-related NCDs in the Pacific”. This partnership is currently developing a full proposal to this effect. (Read more about the workshop here – like to workshop 2)