Is your Company Prepared for NCDs (The Guardian: 19/09/2017)
NCDs refer to physical or mental health condition that lasts for long period of time and causes functional restrictions or requires ongoing monitoring and treatment such as heart disease, high blood pressure, asthma, anemia, diabetes, arthritis, cancer and mood disorders, among many others
What causes and contributes to NCDs?
Lack of exercise – A minimum of 150 minutes of moderate cardiovascular activity spread out throughout the course of each week is recommended. For example, a person can do five 30-minute of brisk walking or jog along with moderate strength training two days a week.
Poor Nutrition – A balanced diet made up a variety of fruits and vegetables, grains, fat-free or low-fat dairy products, protein, and oil every single day and limiting added sugars, saturated and trans fats, as well as sodium, is recommended.
Tobacco Use – No amount of tobacco is considered safe. Smoking can cause many chronic health conditions such as COPD – chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer
Excess alcohol consumption – No more than one alcoholic beverage per day for women and two per day for men is recommended
These four factors may not cause all chronic conditions, but they exacerbate existing ones and some chronic conditions such as high cholesterol and blood pressure are genetic and often times need medication to manage them, no matter how healthy the individual tries to be.
How NCDs affect your workplace?
Not only will NCDs cost more in prescription costs, but they also tend to drive overall medical insurance premiums upwards.
The more chronic conditions a person has, the more likely they are to require and use medical services
Increase in healthcare costs from one chronic condition to the next is exponential and dramatic. Employees with five or more chronic conditions spend fourteen times more on healthcare expenditures than people with zero chronic conditions.
The longer the chronic conditions go undiagnosed, the more expensive they may be to manage.
Chronic conditions lead to lost productivity at workplace – conditions such as arthritis, cancer, diabetes, hypertension can cause employees to miss work – either because they are in too much pain to work or because they are seeking treatment that keeps them out of the office.
The Tanzania Demographic and Health Statistics (TDHS) reports that there is a 16% probability of dying from NCDs in the economically productive age group of 30 – 70. The effort to recruit and train replacements can also cost an employer a considerable amount.
What can you do at your Workplace?
- Gather benchmarks at the onset of your wellness program to measure your company’s rates of smoking, obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease and other key factors
- Introduce customized wellness plans that encourage and motivate behavior modification for healthy lifestyle
- Create employees specific communication packages to motivate and engage employees to take charge of their own health
- Encourage employees to take advantage of each and every preventive care benefits and wellness programs offered
- Introduce biometric testing as part of a comprehensive wellness plan
- Measure, Measure, Measure……
Reply back to bhakti@impactafya.com or call +255 754 694 643 with your feedback. We welcome your suggestions for corporate wellness tips you’d like to see covered in our future columns.
Bhakti Shah, MPH is the Founder and Managing Director of ImpactAfya Ltd, collaborating with Workplace Options and Mayo Clinic, USA to provide Corporate Wellness and EAP Solutions in East Africa. Bhakti is also the Advisor for the Africa Business Portal and the Past President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Tanzania.