Living Together with Chronic Disease: Informal Support for Diabetes Management in Vietnam (VALID): Phase II – Gestational Diabetes in Vietnam

Project summary

Global health is in transition: across the globe, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) pose urgent challenges to individuals, families and governments, hitting the world’s poor particularly hard. Due to their extensive human and economic costs, NCDs are among the major development challenges of the 21st century, holding a key position on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

This project argues that in order to develop more effective and locally grounded responses to the gobal NCD epidemic, the resources and potentials of the informal health care sector (defined as the lay, nonprofessional part of the health care system) must be investigated.
As a case for addressing NCDs, the project focuses on diabetes in Vietnam.

The project is carried out in Vietnam's Thai Binh province as an academic partnership between Thai Binh University of Medicine and Pharmacy and the Universities of Copenhagen and Southern Denmark. The project is conducted in close collaboration with the Danish-Vietnamese Strategic Sector Cooperation (SSC) project: Strengthening the Frontline Grassroots Health Worker: Prevention and Management of NCDs at the Primary Health Care Level, and with Novo Nordisk as private sector partner. Aiming for synergy with the SSC project, the project aims to break new ground in diabetes care by developing innovative models for active involvement of informal support persons in daily disease management, while also enhancing Vietnamese and Danish research capacities in the NCD field.

In Phase 1, the project focuses on day-to-day management of type II diabetes (T2D) in families and local communities, while the proposed Phase 2 focuses on gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) among pregnant women in Thai Binh.

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