WHO Collaborating Centre director Dr A Ramachandran says the project will be coordinated by the WHO Collaborating Centre and a major portion of the funding, amounting to $1.33 million, will come from the Denmark-headquartered World Diabetes Foundation. This is the second project being funded by the WDF in India; the other being with the Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai for better detection and treatment of diabetes retinopathy.

"This is an initiative directed at improving diabetes healthcare delivery and will be an important part of the capacity building for the National Diabetes Control Programme for India. The project aims at training 3,000 doctors and over 1,000 community nurses to implement the national guidelines for prevention and treatment of diabetes through workshops. In addition, short term full-time training courses in areas such as podiatry [diabetic foot], nutrition and dietetics and patient diabetes education will be conducted to train the trainers," says WDF vice-chairman Dr Anil Kapur.

Adds Ramachandran: "A major goal of the project is the inter-sectoral coordination involving various governmental organisations, private sector and private practitioners at all levels. This is necessitated by the existing and anticipated number of people with diabetes in India, which is putting an enormous socio-economic burden on the country. There are an estimated 32 million people with diabetes in the country and by 2030 that number will increase to about 80 million. A vast majority of these people remain undiagnosed or managed improperly due to healthcare capacity constraint."

Recently, a coordinated effort to develop the National Diabetes Control Programme (NDCP) has been initiated by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) at the behest of the Indian government. "In April and May, two high-powered workshops on NDCP were organised in Chennai. It is hoped that NDCP will be formally launched later this year. However, the formulation and execution of any plan faces the major constraints of lack of financial resources and trained manpower," says ICMR deputy director-general Dr Rakesh Mittal, who was also present on the occasion.

"This project, we believe, will help us in creating some of the manpower resources that will be needed to combat the problem of diabetes in the coming years," says Dr Kapur.

Dr Vijay Viswanathan, joint director, WHO Collaborating Centre, highlighted the morbidity and mortality caused by complications in persons with diabetes and emphasised that several complications such as renal disease, eye disease, cardiovascular disease and hypertension associated with diabetes are potentially preventable or reversible and screening for complications of diabetes is extremely important.

The WHO-WDF National Diabetes Training Programme will aim to:

• Disseminate and encourage the use of guidelines for treatment as well as primary and secondary prevention of diabetes
  
• Develop the necessary course curriculum and training tools to train the doctors and paramedical staff
  
• Conduct relevant training programmes for doctors and community nurses
  
• Encourage the establishment of a network of diabetes management and prevention centres at district hospitals and community health centres, and
  
• Attempt to raise the level of awareness of policy-makers, health system managers, NGOs and the general public.