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Permanent Secretary for Health, Dr James Fong admits their focus on Non-Communicable Diseases, the biggest killer in the country was hugely impacted during the two years of the pandemic.

While opening the two-day Fiji College of General Practitioners Conference in Sigatoka today, Dr Fong stated the consequences of this will be felt by the patients as they try to navigate through this.

He says the Ministry knew it will be difficult to maintain their chronic disease services especially when they needed to divert much of their attention to battling COVID-19.

“A lot of our hospitals had to take extra measures to mitigate the risk of mixing a sick person with NCDs with others who had COVID-19 and in the course of mixing us ending up attenuating our bed space making it hard for people to access in patient care.”

According to Dr Fong, in the past two years, a lot of the non-COVID deaths were due to cardiac anomalies and at least 70% of deaths not related to the pandemic occurred at home which put the spotlight on accessibility.

He also stresses that on top of this, there were a lot of conspiracy theories flying around regarding these deaths.

“What was even more concerning is that in many cases people were so busy they were not able to properly classify the cause of death in many of what we call non-COVID deaths, it was really difficult to classify the cause of death?”

Dr Fong further highlighted that many of the earlier COVID deaths did not have any pre-existing conditions noted down which they later revised to include NCD checks during their swabbing and house to house visit.

The conference will end tomorrow.