Health Cards (54)
-----------------
Greetings Richard,
Richard Laing wrote:
Health Cards (33)
-----------------
I too was impressed by Jaap's remarks though I would not completely
discount facility based family records. What I have seen in Indonesia
... (stuff deleted) ...
I was interested in the mention of Arthur Heywood. Together with Bruce
Campbell and Sam Adjei they have produced a very useful booklet called
'From data to decision making in health. The evolution of a health
management information system'. It is published by the Royal Tropical
... (more stuff deleted)...
are useful and reasonably easy to collect. I am concerned that their
list of out-patient diseases that are subject to monthly collection
and surveillance is too long. 50 conditions is at least 20 too many.
I just wanted to let you know that I appreciated your comments on the
book written together with Sam Adjei and Arthur Heywood "From Data to
decision making in health".
In particular, I like the concern expressed about the length of the
monthly Out-Patient disease surveillance self assessment tool/reporting
format. As with the other self-assessment tools, the real challenge was
to minimize information to be collected. Our greatest adversaries were
in the Center for Health Statistics and the epidemiologists, who always
wanted more.
The first draft of the list (after much debate) was in excess of 100 ICD
classified diseases together with gender and 5 age breakdowns. (800
cells of data per month!) We considered it a great preliminary success
to reduce the number ot classifications to 50 and eliminate gender and
age from routine reporting and assessment. This was complemented by
once per year reporting on age and gender
A next phase of HMIS reform should push for collecting less data
routinely, and doing rapid record assessments and sentinel
surveillance as required for more detail. This would be combined with
development and introduction of a viable mechanism for immediately
reportable diseases. As telephone and fax services improve,
possibilities for monitoring "immediately reportable" diseases should
also improve.
Thanks again,
Bruce Campbell
--
Bruce Campbell
Royal Tropical Institute
mailto:campbell@mos.com.np
--
Send mail for the `AFRO-NETS' conference to `afro-nets@usa.healthnet.org'.
Mail administrative requests to `majordomo@usa.healthnet.org'.
For additional assistance, send mail to: `owner-afro-nets@usa.healthnet.org'.