(MENAFN- Gulf Times) Close on the heels of the successful introduction of the smart diabetes clinic in Wakra Health Centre, the Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC), is planning to launch clinics for comprehensive screening of several diseases at some of its health centres.
Speaking to Gulf Times on the sidelines of International Diabetes Leadership Forum, Dr Samya al-Abdulla, director of operations, PHCC, said that the clinics will be launched sometime next year.
'The comprehensive screening will include several diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, cancer, cholesterol, mental health and thyroid among others. This will help to understand if a person has any of these diseases or the possibility of developing any of them,” explained Dr al-Abdulla.
'This is a pilot programme and therefore it will be introduced only in one or two health centres in the beginning. We will identify the health centres and announce the details very soon. After the piloting, if it is successful,we will hopefully roll it out in other health centres,” she stated.
As for the modalities of inviting the people for screening, al-Abdulla said that several procedures are still to be developed. 'When we started the smart diabetes clinic in Wakra, we selected people with risk factors. Until now, we have not finalised the process of getting people for screening for this programme. Most probably, we might select the people based on our data,” she said.
Regarding the smart diabetes clinic in Wakra Health Centre, Dr al-Abdulla said that PHCC had collected the details of over 10,000 Qatari patients registered under the health centre. 'Among them, we found that a total of 3,343 could be at the risk of developing diabetes. We invited them for screening at the clinic.”
'Over 1,100 have gone for screening from January to August this year and out of them, 62% were found to be normal. 365 were found pre-diabetic and 55 were found to be diabetic. At present the facility is only for Qatari nationals but later we will open it for other residents too,” she concluded.