Abstract:
Diabetes and high blood pressure are two key chronic diseases whose incidences in the population is increasing steadily. To control these two diseases, health care systems need to reap the potentials of community-driven mechanisms to conduct health promotion and disease prevention activities in the community, in addition to the curative care services by health facilities. Local Health Security Fund (LHSF) is one innovative voluntary mechanism that has been established in Thailand to encourage local authorities to be more active in health promotion. This study investigates the factors that affect the decisions of LHSFs to conduct health promotion and disease prevention activities related to diabetes and hypertension using mixed methods. A questionnaire was developed using qualitative studies to collect information on the characteristics of community and its leaderships and the health promotion activities being carried out by the LHSFs. A survey of representatives of local government responsible for LHSFs was done in April 2014. . Descriptive analyses of the survey results and inferential statistics on the relationship between local community factors and health promotion categories were done using bivariate analysis and multivariate analysis. There were 1,159 respondents, of which 1,144 (98.4%) provided complete answers to the questionnaire. Among them, 1,072 (93.7%) already joined the LHSFs. Most LHSFs implemented key activities for health promotion and prevention of diabetes, hypertension in the community. The activities however varied. Most common type of activities in the community are establishing network for health promotion, while providing health education was the least common type. We found that community leaders and local resource availability are important factors in relation to health promotion through human capacity development, while local resource availability, health needs, political climate, and technical capacity are significantly linked to system and environment management for health promotion.