The WHO Country Officer to Ghana, Mr. Frank John Luke declared that NCDs kill 41 million people every year, 85% of which are recorded in low and middle income countries. Current statistics available show that in Ghana NCDs contribute to about 45% of overall mortality through Cardiovascular diseases, Cancers, Chronic respiratory ailments and Diabetes among others. He said these in his speech during the occasion of presenting the Ghana STEPS Report at the Alisa Hotel.
The main NCD risk factors Mr. Luke has mentioned include: improper diet, physical inactivity, tobacco consumption and alcohol misuse. He pointed out that all these problems affect worse with urbanization, changes in people’s lifestyles, and limited healthcare needs. Mr. Luke also supported the above global and reginal risk factors call for equitable effective measures towards reduction of NCD burden in Ghana. He emphasized on need to get the right and timely data of trends in NCD risks, and pointed to the survey at the national level on Risk Factor Survey using WHO STEPwise for NCD Surveillance.
The findings of the survey will also be useful in assessing the performance of Ghana’s multisectoral action plan for NCDs for the year 2022-2027. According to Dr. Darius Osei who was on speaking on behalf of the Minister of Health, NCDs have become a significant cause of death in over twenty nine countries in the last decade causing one hundred and fifty million deaths of people in their productive prime, between age 30 and 70, with the burden being felt predominantly in developing countries. One related implication that he pointed out was that the burden of NCDs is rising and not only at developed countries, but in countries in development as well.
According to Dr. Osei, the STEPS Survey is meant to establish a base from which more intensive monitoring, surveillance and tracking can be done to help understand Ghana’s position on performance of the country with respect to the global NCD targets. He reaffirmed the country’s commitment to translating the 2013-2030 Global NCDs Action Plan to promote affordable public health interventions such as taxes on tobacco, alcohol and sugary products, school and community health promotion programs.
He also heard our concerns as he also noted that Ghana is also seeking to undertake some changes to social insurance and human capital development as manifested by current policy debates in an effort to enhance the quality of data on NCDs and its individual risks. Also, to obtain comparable data on other NCD-related indicators at the HDHS level and to generate nationally representative estimates of key risk factors, the WHO STEPS Survey methodology is being introduced.
The survey procedure involves first obtaining demographic and household characteristics, secondly conducting standardised questionnaires to determine lifestyle risk factors, anthropometric measurements, and finally, biochemical measurements gathered from blood and urine samples.
Data for the 2023 Ghana STEPS survey was collected from both urban and rural areas in all the sixteen regions in Ghana including; western, central, Greater Accra, volta, Eastern, Western North, Ashanti, Bono, Bono East, Oti, Ahafo, Northern, Savannah, North East, Upper East and Upper West. The findings from the 2023 Ghana STEPS survey indicate a high prevalence of NCD risk factors: Tobacco use involves 4.8% of the inverse population, alcohol is used by 22.6% of the people, 19.6% suffer from high blood pressure, 5.2% are diabetic and 34.3% are either overweight or obese.
