BACKGROUND :

In most of the developing countries around the world, NCD policies and programs are still evolving and the implementation remains even slower. Hence the main objective of PMAC 2019 evolves around ‘accelerating’ implementation of NCD prevention and control. Effective monitoring of implementation is a must to ensure accountability and continued financing—another key focus of the conference. Monitoring of ‘systems response’ including both programmatic (e.g. source of care, cost of services, continuation of care, level of enforcement of relevant laws such as comprehensive bans on advertisement, etc) and service utilization indicators (e.g. proportion of population in need covered with screening and treatment, quality of services indicators) is required to assess the level of program implementation. The monitoring and evaluation systems should allow us to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate policies/programs and help us to fine-tune them to maximize the investment returns. Conducting surveillance for NCDs is a relatively new and underfunded in most of the countries. In many instances, the data are incomplete and imperfect, especially for mortality. Countries need to develop techniques to utilize these incomplete data while making the efforts to improve the completeness and quality of the data. Finally, the data generated on risk factors, mortality should be used further to influence the policies. This may require further analytical techniques such as cost-effectiveness analysis and other form of economic analysis to generate policy-relevant information from these data. We examine three of specific issues related to NCD surveillance in this session as listed below.