CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) The Caribbean Community (CARICOM), with full support from the Pan American Heal(th Organisation (PAHO), is gaining ground in its fight against Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases in the Caribbean Region.

Notwithstanding this, the Community is ensuring that its regional plan for the prevention and control of NCDs continues to be effective, and to this end, with the assistance of the Government of Spain, is conducting a workshop with key focal points and stakeholders on NCDS to fine-tune its three-year Strategic Plan for the Caribbean, titled Non-Communicable Disease Prevention and Control: 2009-2013.

The strategic plan examines components crucial to curtailing the epidemic of Chronic NCDs in the Caribbean. These elements include: Risk Factor Reduction and Health Promotion, Disease Management, Surveillance, Public Policy and Advocacy, Communications and Patient Education and Programme Management.

The two-day workshop, at the PAHO Office in Barbados on 24-25 November, is being facilitated by key regional and international experts on disease prevention control. It comes against the background of the CARICOM Heads of Government’s commitment to support strategies to stop the epidemic of Chronic NCDS. This commitment is implicit in what is now known as the Port-of-Spain Declaration arising out of the landmark Summit on Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) held on 15 September 2007 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. One of the 15 Point tenets of the Declaration had called for continued support of Heads of Government “for CARICOM and PAHO as the joint Secretariat …. to be the entity responsible for revision of the regional plan for the prevention and control of NCDs, and the monitoring and evaluation of the Port-of-Spain Declaration.

Chaired by Dr Rudolph Cummings, Programme Manager, Health Sector Development at the CARICOM Secretariat, the workshop brings together regional stakeholders who will review and refine the draft NCD Plan and identify components or modules of the plan which can be presented to donor agencies for funding.

Participants of the workshop will lead by example in the Secretariat’s promotion of physical activity as a healthy response to NCDs, hence, as a special feature of the workshop, participants will engage daily in 15- 20 minutes physical activities, such as dancing, in the conference.