Hypertension is considered as the biggest single risk factor for deaths worldwide. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), hypertension causes 7 million deaths every year while 1.5 billion people suffer due to its complications.
In countless more studies Hypertension has remained as one of the most common and most lingering cause of mortality and morbidity and its prevalence is expected to continually rise in the years to come. Usually a person lives off normally without feeling any symptoms at all before progressing into a more serious state where mild or severe symptoms can be felt, most of the time even people with symptoms do not seek consult or even they had already seek consult they cannot afford the maintenance medication that are required to treat hypertension.
Barangay Bag-Ong Dalaguete is not exempted in the continuous rise of prevalence of hypertension in the world and among Filipinos. Although with the lack of sufficient secondary data, in our several weeks of stay and establishing of rapport we have noticed that there are plenty of undocumented and unidentified hypertensives who are do not seek for consult and this in turn lead to a more serious morbidity as time progresses. We have yet to find out why these people do not seek consult but we have identified several causes of Hypertension for the community residents of Barangay Bag-Ong Dalaguete and most of the causes are the modifiable ones. Diet and lifestyle are one of the modifiable factors of hypertension and in Barangay Bag-Ong Dalaguete these are what caught our attention the most, since the barangay is located deep within the mountainous areas of the municipality, people limit their grocery shopping and only buy and eat non-perishable or not easily perishable like canned goods or dried goods high in salt and this composes the majority of their diet. For lifestyle, majority of the men in barangay Bag-Ong Dalaguete engage in smoking and drinking, this is quite alarming in a community where hypertensives are undocumented.
Our groups goal is to identify who are the hypertensives, find out the reason behind it and establish strategies to overcome or to lower the prevalence of hypertension with in Barangay Bag-Ong Dalaguete, Municipality of Mahayag, Zamboanga del Sur.
PROPOSED SOLUTIONS
Identification, Awareness and Compliance Monitoring
1. Identification of target hypertensive individuals and its monitoring with in the community population.
2. Increase knowledge and awareness of community residents regarding hypertension, importance of medication compliance and healthy lifestyle promotion.
3. Improve the monitoring and the medication compliance rate of the diagnosed hypertensive patients.