The Department of Planning and Policy at the Zanzibar Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MoHSW) is taking a leadership role in coordinating donor and government efforts toward adoption of new systems. Following Capacity Project’s installation of the iHRIS Manage software application earlier this year, the Department of Planning and Policy has been working with DANIDA to coordinate a government-wide data collection activity. Work is scheduled to begin in the upcoming months and will collect data on health workers, training needs, and many other vital pieces of information for entry into the new iHRIS Manage system. Capacity Project will assist again following the data collection activity with data entry and I am certain we will find additional areas to compliment the good work of the Zanzibar MoHSW and DANIDA.
We are often challenged by multiple donors and government organizations all working to solve similar problems but not always collaborating on the solutions. It is very encouraging to see what the Department of Planning and Policy is accomplishing by marrying the donor activities of Capacity Project and DANIDA and by obtaining buy-in and participation committment from all government agencies.
Southern Sudan is taking important first steps toward the national implementation of iHRIS Manage, the Capacity Project’s human resources (HR) management software. The software will be installed in HR offices in Central Equatoria, Western Bahr al Ghazal and Upper Nile in the upcoming weeks. In preparation, HR officers and HR information systems point persons from each of the three states attended a three-day training session on the system and learned how to enter data and produce reports.
To ensure full participation in country-wide implementation, the Project also held a workshop for 21 directors and director generals from all ten states and the central government, along with representatives from WHO and the International Organization for Migration. Participants reviewed data flow, and used their own health workforce data (collected with support from the Project earlier this year) to practice using data for decision making. An important outcome of this workshop was the decision to create a data collection tool and training materials to assist county health officers in supervising data collection at the health facilities. These tools will help to improve data quality and also build local capacity for sustaining the software.
One of the Capacity Project’s objectives in Southern Sudan is to establish a national human resources information system (HRIS) that provides current data for health workforce planning and management. A key challenge has been connecting data from the ten states to a central database housed in the Ministry of Health (MOH). In Fall 2007, the Project strengthened and restructured an existing Access database to include information from paper-based registries, added pull-down menus to minimize errors, increased security and guided the development of a coding system. Project staff created standardized data-collection forms to gather information on qualified health workers from training schools and health facilities, and trained MOH staff on data collection and entry. Project and MOH staff are using the forms to collect information from 23 sites in the ten states, and expect to complete data entry by the end of February. Project staff will then merge and clean the data, design reports and conduct a stakeholder leadership meeting with training on how to use the HRIS and create reports.
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