The WHO Countrywide Integrated Non-communicable Diseases (CINDI) programme in Slovenia

Abstract

Many different community based intervention projects/programmes were designed and/or implemented since the early 1970s to combat chronic non-communicable diseases, many of them being international. Countrywide Integrated Non-communicable Diseases Intervention programme (CINDI) of the World Health Organization (WHO), Regional Office for Europe, which started to spread its ideas in the 1980s, is one of them. Slovenia as a state officially joined international CINDI programme at the beginning of the 1990s, when its activities were limited to Ljubljana demonstrational area. First few years were used as an introductory period of the programme, while more systematically organized activities begun in the late 1990s. The paper presents the historical development of the CINDI programme in Slovenia, and the role of CINDI Slovenia Preventive Unit in it.