Early detection of non-communicable diseases
If diseases are detected early before they progress, their management outcome will be effective or curing rate will be highest. Therefore; health extension workers in their catchment area can do screening to detect cases with some common chronic non-communicable diseases early.
The screening can be conducted through community diagnosis. As you have learned before, a community profile of the catchment area needs to be prepared by conducting community diagnosis. Through community diagnosis, you can identify the health problems of your community, so that you can prioritise the identified community health problems to be solved step by step.
In addition to the community diagnosis, early detection of suspected cases can be conducted by taking history and conducting physical examination of the patients during the home visit or when patients come to the health post for seeking health service.
The signs and symptoms of some common chronic non-communicable diseases like Diabetes mellitus, cancer (cervical and breast cancers), Hypertension, Mental illness and cataract are briefly discussed on the presentation of the respective diseases (course of studies) in this module. The suspected cases detected early at the Health post / community / level have to be referred to the nearest higher level for further confirmatory diagnosis and appropriate management.
Community diagnosis is the process of identifying and describing the health and health related problems of a given community.
Methods of community diagnosis:
- Data collection - this can be done through structured questionnaires, interview, discussion with community leaders and health workers or recorded review.
- Compilation of data
- Analysis and interpretation of data and write up.
Because of resource scarcity, it is not possible to address all the identified problems at the same time. Therefore a set of criterion has to be considered to prioritize the identified problems.