Countries all over the world are now faced with a growing epidemic of chronic diseases such as diabetes, stroke, hypertension, coronary heart disease, asthma, and mental illnesses. Recently, there was a call by the World Health Organization (WHO) to urge governments to make chronic disease as their number one national health priority. In “Preventing Chronic Diseases: A Vital Investment,” the WHO highlighted the ever-growing mortality and morbidity of chronic diseases in developed and developing nations. Faced with this epidemic of chronic diseases, there is now a growing global interest to improve the quality and to contain the costs of caring for our patients who are afflicated with chronic illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, ischaemic heart disease, chronic renal failure, asthma, osteoporosis, and many others. It is also becoming clearer now that there is a convergence of factors - the changing practices of family physicians, the ever growing number of informed and motivated health consumers, increasing use of health information technology and evidenced based medicine - that necessitate better management of patients with chronic diseases.
In Singapore, NHG has taken the lead in tackling the growing epidemic of chronic diseases globally. We were an early adopter and innovator in conceptualising and implementing novel approaches towards the management of chronic diseases since 2000. Nationally, we started off with key programmes such as hypertension, diabetes and high colesterol and now, we have programmes for congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, osteoporosis, stroke, early detection and management of mental illness, and asthma.
As part of our efforts to empower patients and to provide the right information in the right way to the right patients, we have created this website to allow for patients and their caregivers a continual access of information. This is part of our efforts to promote self-management in our patient and caregivers to learn to be responsible for their day-to-day care. Patients are often the best person to monitor their own condition. As a result, they must be active participants in the treatment and must adopt self-management as a life long task.