This year’s World Diabetes Day was yesterday launched, in Accra, with a call on health professionals to shift focus to other areas of service condition than the usual agitation over salary increment.
The day is celebrated annually to promote universal health coverage for affordable and equitable access to diabetes management, including improving the knowledge and capacities of people with diabetes and their families, to be able to take care of themselves to reduce economic hardship in households.
This year’s celebration is on the theme: “The Nurse and Diabetes” and aims to raise awareness on the crucial role of nurses in supporting people living with diabetes.
Launching the event, the Minister of Health, Kwaku Agyeman Manu said the COVID-19 pandemic had revealed that, the country’s health human resource at all levels and categories needed to be protected.
“Our nurses and other health care workers are not more special than any other person walking the streets of our country, but just as in any battle, they have placed themselves at the frontline and risked life and limb to protect the health of the rest of the population,” he said.
The minister said there was the need to protect this category of human resource, who in turn would offer services to protect the health of the rest of the population, just like soldiers on the war front.”
Mr Manu noted that if care was not taken and the needed measures put in place to protect nurses and other health professionals, any subsequent epidemic or pandemic would overtake not only the health system, but the economy.
Touching on diabetes, he said more than four million people living in the country had the disease, constitutes 34 per cent of deaths annually.
Mr Manu said that only 10 per cent of cases in the country were diagnosed earlier for proper medical care, stressing that “The remaining 90 per cent unfortunately are detected after the death of the victim.”
“It is known that persons diagnosed with diabetes must follow lifelong care plans to manage the disease, and nurses are at the forefront of educating and managing diabetic patients. While doctors may create a diabetic care plan, it usually falls on nurses to provide care and to educate patients about managing their conditions,” he added.
The minister said nurses must do all these while assisting to manage patients with other conditions, both acute and chronic.
“Caring for patients, including those with diabetes is not an easy task in this era of COVID-19, as there is absolutely no way to determine with naked eye who was infected.
“And with the rising COVID-19 infections, one can just imagine the anxiety being felt by nurses. It will not be fair to blame nurses if they feel a bit anxious about attending to patients with conditions that are considered non emergencies, and this underscores the need for us to put in place measures to protect our nurses and indeed health professionals as a whole,” the minister said.
BY CLIFF EKUFUL
