Timely and accurate recording of data is crucial to ensuring an efficient healthcare delivery, the head of the health campaign group, Focus 1000, has said.
Mr Mohamed Bailor Jalloh said data collection was also crucial in the Sierra Leone government’s crusade against the twin health crisis of maternal and infant mortality. He was speaking on Thursday in the northern town of Makeni during the official opening ceremony of a training on data collection for health workers. The training which is part of a UK funded initiative was designed to digitalise data collection in health facilities with the goal of enhancing healthcare services provision.
Jalloh bemoaned the rate of maternal mortality in Sierra Leone, saying it renders the future of the country bleak, calling for a concerted effort to tackle it. He said proper data collection will be crucial to ensure proper response to maternal mortality and other health issues facing the country.
The ministry of Health says the current mode of data collection involves a lot of paper work which consumes time with a high risk of error.
Some 60 community health administrators drawn from across the Bombali District are undergo training on the operation of tablets (digital device) on how to input and share data to a central server system to be used for decision make.
This training is a component of a larger UK funded initiative designed to strengthen Sierra Leone’s health sector. Focus 1000 is one of a consortium of several local and international NGOs dubbed ‘CHANGES’ which is implementing several projects designed to address key issues affecting the health sector.
Other NGOs involved include World Hope and the Volunteer Services Oversea, otherwise known as VSO. Also involved is the UN family, notably UNICEF.
Focus 1000 is implementing the data collection project under the title: ‘Saving Lives’. Under this project health workers will be given the tablets into which daily information recorded at community health facilities will be inputed electronically and uploaded onto a central server.
With the current system which involves huge paper work, health workers are required to travel long distances every month to submit their data, with some covering as much as 18 miles to their District health centers, where one individual is expected to sit through nearly a thousand papers entering figures into a computer within 15 days.
Consequently, Sierra Leone has not been able to make proper use of data to make informed decisions to address health issues, says Dr Samuel Kargbo, Director of Health Systems, Policy Planning and Information in the Ministry of Health and Sanitation.
“We want people to use data,” Kargbo said as he officially opened the training session at the conference hall of the District Management Team in Makeni.
The training targets health workers from Community Health Centers across the Bombali District which is being used as a pilot project, with the aim of expansion to the rest of the country by the end of the year.