From Nightmare to Awakening: Performance Improvement for Health Management in Uganda
At the Uganda
<http://www.capacityproject.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=58&Itemid=90> Protestant Medical Bureau, executive director Dr. Lorna Muhirwe struggled to get the information she needed to most effectively lead the network of over 250 facilities that play a vital role in the country's health care. A health management information system (HMIS) was designed to help, but it wasn't working well: "Data analysis was a nightmare and it was causing us immense challenges," she says. "Something was going wrong so we approached the Capacity Project, through whose support we have managed to come up with this exciting web-based HMIS."
The Capacity Project helped with a needs assessment as the initial step toward aligning management and supervision functions with the needs of local health teams. Records managers identified expected HMIS performance and compiled a list of good practices local teams must have in place to register, compile, analyze, report and use information for decision-making. Project staff developed an Excel-based tool for measuring actual performance and pretested it in ten facilities. Using the tool, health managers then administered a nationwide HMIS performance assessment at 40 facilities.
While low resources were assumed to be responsible for poor HMIS performance, the assessment showed that the main problems were actually weak reporting, data analysis and decision-making. The Uganda Protestant Medical Bureau designed interventions to face these challenges, and the Project is assisting with the development of a web-based tool to make reporting easier and provide automatic analysis of the information. This tool will allow staff to focus on making decisions.
To learn more about this performance improvement initiative, please click here <http://www.capacityproject.org/images/stories/Voices/voices_30.pdf> .
Also available in French <http://www.capacityproject.org/images/stories/Voices/voices_30_f.pdf> .
Performance improvement workshop at UPMB
Jennifer Solomon
Communications Specialist
The Capacity Project
IntraHealth International
6340 Quadrangle Drive, Suite 200
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27517
+1-919-433-5759
http://www.capacityproject.org/
mailto:jsolomon@intrahealth.org