Since the debut of Dr Edward Wagner's Chronic Care Model, chronic disease management (CDM) has gradually become a major global phenomenon. Many countries have adopted CDM as the approach towards managing their chronic disease burden. In Singapore, like most developed countries, we have also used the Wagner's Model. Over the last 6 years, we have gained considerable experience locally in implementing programmes and through our last 3 conferences, we have shared our successes and failures, both locally and overseas. In the 2006 conference, we reached out to our regional partners from Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong SAR, Australia, Canada, and China.

Now, with a greater global interest in CDM, we feel it is indeed timely to transform our conference into a truly global event. As chronic diseases are an emerging global problem and the knowledge base is still evolving, we feel that there is a pressing need for various countries and agencies to act proactively now to prevent the catastrophe of a full blown epidemic of these diseases. For this forthcoming event, we will be inviting international speakers to engage the global community of healthcare professionals who are also tackling this critical issue. We also hope to engage active participation from developing countries such as Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and beyond Asia including the African nations.

Our main objectives for this conference are to share frameworks of CDM, identify critical success factors, and showcase innovative local and international programmes that work. There will also be opportunities to network and collaborate between countries that seek information to design programmes specific to their own populations. These objectives are in line with World Health Organization's (WHO) call to invest in strategies in chronic disease management. Hence, the theme for this conference is “Think Global, Do Local.” This emphasizes the importance to act upon the strategies of chronic disease management from the global community and cascade them into the local context.

The anticipated audience at this conference will comprise leaders and senior management from various Ministries of Health, physicians, nurses, allied health professionals from hospitals, primary care providers and community-based organisations. We also expect pharmaceutical and healthcare IT related companies to be interested in participating at this conference in view of the potential networking opportunities. This conference will be the single largest and most focused event on CDM in the Asia Pacific Region.

We invite you to join us in Singapore and be part of a revolution to spread chronic disease management, change practice and innovate care delivery systems. We look forward to seeing you!