Local Implementation of NCD Continuity of Care in Emergencies

NCDs cause 74% of all deaths worldwide, yet when disaster strikes, the systems that keep people with chronic conditions alive are the first to break. A person with Type 1 diabetes can die within days without insulin; someone with severe hypertension can suffer a stroke without medication; the stress of the crisis itself can trigger heart attacks, severe asthma attacks, or diabetic ketoacidosis. In 2024 alone, nearly 300 million people needed humanitarian assistance, conflicts had doubled over five years, and almost 400 major natural disasters occurred.

TGLF partnered with Dr Shanthi Mendis - retired WHO Senior Adviser for Noncommunicable Diseases and lead author of the WHO Package of Essential NCD Interventions (PEN) and its humanitarian adaptation (PEN-H) - to turn these guidelines into a local implementation model. Community health workers and volunteers, nurses, and non-prescribing clinicians each get a role-specific pathway to analyze why NCD care is breaking down in their own setting, design a practical local fix - from identifying at-risk individuals to supporting medication adherence - and implement it with support from a global network of peers doing the same work.

This is TGLF's Impact Accelerator applied directly to NCD continuity of care: moving from root-cause analysis, to local action design, to implementation and shared evidence of what works - not a one-off training event.

TGLF is seeking EU partners and funding to scale this implementation model to more humanitarian settings and strengthen NCD-inclusive emergency preparedness at national and local level.