“Safe Care for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) – Safe Care for Life”: An Equity Perspective
Esha Ray Chaudhuri, PhD – PFPSC Member
The 2026 WPSD theme “Safe Care for NCDs – Safe Care for Life!”, marks a milestone in the field of Patient Safety. It enhances the individual concepts of both patient and safety using equity as an overarching principle for guiding the field’s path forward. The equity focus sets a transformative point of view that patient safety should consider not only individual medical harm during treatment, but also relevant lifestyle and environmental risk factors, where health equity is determined by `the conditions in which people are born grow, live, work, play and age’ (WHO, Health equity and its determinants, 2021). Within this equity based transformative approach, patients are recognized as persons with their own agency and safety, is acknowledged to be a sustainable social and ethical human right.
According to World Health Organization (WHO, Invisible umbers, 2022), NCDs currently include cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, diabetes, cancer and mental health. Globally, NCDs are not only the major cause of premature and preventable deaths, but they also threaten the progress of countries to achieve the health and wellbeing objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The long-term nature of medically treating NCDs requires access to multiple social and economic resources, which challenges safe care of vulnerable patients, particularly from socially disadvantaged communities. However, equity analysis of health and economic benefits indicate that simple and affordable initiatives to address NCDs, including interventions as part of WHO’s “best buys” (WHO, Saving Lives, spending Less, 2025), lead to better population health outcomes than isolated clinical medical efforts for curing the illness (OECD, Health and Economic Benefits of Tackling NCDs, 2026).
In Canada, NCDs are a major public health challenge and require an integrated approach to address root causes of diverse risk factors such as air pollution, diet and nutrition, tobacco and alcohol use, income and physical activity (OECD, Health and Economic Benefits of Tackling NCDs: Canada, 2026). This is supported by the WPSD objective of integrating “patient safety principles across NCD-related legislation, policies, strategies and programmes, with an emphasis on strengthening PHC-oriented health systems”. This integrated sector approach is central in Canadian research on household food insecurity, where understanding the connections between different social and economic sector policies and health system concerns can lead to safer care for diet and nutrition related diseases (Idzerda L, Lazarescu C, Corrin T, et al, 2025).
NCDs need an integrated approach
Recognition of “Safe Care for NCDs” integrated with “Safe Care for Life!” indicate the most pressing issues facing health care today often relate to (a) addressing the impact of upstream social factors on individual health and (b) acknowledging the interdependence of health systems and other sectors of Ethical, Legal and Social Issues (ELSI). These challenges are seldom addressed within an individual disease-based patient safety approach. Achievement of the sustainable well-being of every patient as a partner and a comprehensive recognition of their lived experience, can respond to persisting inequities within the healthcare and social systems and enhance the value of medical care.
