Monitoring Bill Brieger | 17 Jul 2014 09:43 am
Improving the Quality of Malaria Data in Burkina Faso
Jhpiego and partners have been implementing USAID’s Improving Malaria Care (IMC) project in Burkina Faso for the past 9 months. In the paragraphs below, the team in Ouagadougou has reported their experiences in improving the quality of malaria data reported from the district level. Good quality data are needed to identify challenges and successes and make decisions for future malaria programming
IMC involves data collectors (Healthcare providers) directly in the data validation process. Previously, the malaria data validation was supported by the Global Funds and was done at the Regional level. The new approach proposed by IMC is to organize malaria data validation at district level where the healthcare providers who continuously collect data, can participate in the data validation meetings.
The pilot phase was conducted in the first 20 supported Health Districts in April (14th – 18th). In total, 520 healthcare providers attended the data validation meetings across 20 Health Districts. The most important lessons learnt are following:
- The involvement of the primary data collectors (Healthcare providers) in this activity reinforced their capacity to improve data quality;
- The correction of the mistakes made during these meeting have been integrated in the national database (BD_Malaria);
- This was another opportunity to explain the key indicators of malaria and how to control the data quality inside of the Health Facility;
- Based on the quantity of the mistakes noted during these data validation meetings in only 20 Health Districts (20 of 63 HD), we can affirm that these are some important data quality issues.
Dr Kam Semon, District Medical Officer of Banfora Health District, after the Data validation workshop shared his views of the experience.
“Firstly, allow me to thank Jhpiego for his permanent assistance and innovation regarding healthcare management. I have appreciated the new approach developed by Jhpiego to ensure data quality. During this meeting I have noted that they are lot of mistakes in the data we used to plan and to make decision.
“I have noted that the Data manager at District level and healthcare providers (who collect routine data) have to work very closely to improve and ensure data quality. That means we have to more involve the Data Manager of District in the regular supervision visits. […] I promised you to use the new approach for all health data validation.
“I will discuss with my team, to include the data validation using that new approach in our quarterly health management meeting. I would like to thank Jhpiego once again. I also thank USAID for his financial support to the IMC project. “