How to Respond

Developing and Applying a Framework for Policy Options

While the health sector bears most of the burden for treating NCDs, preventive interventions lie both inside and outside the health sector.

policy options framework

A “policy options framework” provides policy makers with a tool for making broader systemic decisions that aim at balancing interventions and providing the optimal strategic mix of population-based interventions in the community to reduce risk factors and of individual-based interventions within the clinical setting to treat risk factors and morbidity.

From a policy perspective, this framework is useful because population- and individual-based interventions mobilize different parts of the non-health and health sectors and require very different inputs in terms of infrastructure, capacity, and skill sets; they also yield very different outputs and outcomes. Harmonizing both intervention modes is necessary to ensure that population-based interventions complement those delivered within the clinical care system.

Different countries are at different stages of development of their NCD programs and it is therefore important to integrate this aspect in the framework. The framework analyzes NCD program management in four stages.

Four stages are:

Assess, Plan, Develop and Implement, and Evaluate.