GBD 2019 | Collaborating in Japan

Professor Shuhei Nomura of the Department of Health Policy and Management at Keio University in Japan shares how he uses Global Burden of Disease Study data to advance health policy for prefectures, nationwide nutrition, and resource allocation. The GBD is a powerful tool for health researchers, policymakers, economists, epidemiologists, and many others.

Explore GBD 2019: www.healthdata.org/gbd

Transcript: Thanks to the advantage of GBD's very comprehensive data, I use GBD as part of my policy evaluation research and consulting work. For example, the GBD showed the increasing health gap between prefectures in Japan. I have shared the data with the government officials of prefectures and discussed the cause of the gap with various stakeholders and exchanged the information on health promotion efforts in prefectures. In addition, I have proposed the use of Burden of Disease as a new indicator for the food industry. Unhealthy diet is one of the risk factors contributing most to disease burden in Japan, and I have analyzed several scenarios of for example, future sodium intake, to see what future scenario would reduce that disease burden in the country. They are used as a piece of evidence to design strategies for the food industry to achieve a healthier society. I also proposed the use of disease burden as one of the benchmarks for resource allocation. I have shown the gap between the allocation of the public research funding in Japan and actual medical needs, based on the disease burden, and they are used to inform discussion of prioritization in the government health policy, and the research and development.