Evaluation of the malaria reporting system supported by the District Health Information System 2 in Solomon Islands
Wangdi, Kinley, Sarma, Haribondu, Leaburi, John, McBryde, Emma, and Clements, Archie C.A. (2020) Evaluation of the malaria reporting system supported by the District Health Information System 2 in Solomon Islands. Malaria Journal, 19. 372.
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Abstract
Background
District Health Information Systems 2 (DHIS2) is used for supporting health information management in 67 countries, including Solomon Islands. However, there have been few published evaluations of the performance of DHIS2-enhanced disease reporting systems, in particular for monitoring infectious diseases such as malaria. The aim of this study was to evaluate DHIS2 supported malaria reporting in Solomon Islands and to develop recommendations for improving the system.
Methods
The evaluation was conducted in three administrative areas of Solomon Islands: Honoria City Council, and Malaita and Guadalcanal Provinces. Records of nine malaria indicators including report submission date, total malaria cases, Plasmodium falciparum case record, Plasmodium vivax case record, clinical malaria, malaria diagnosed with microscopy, malaria diagnosed with (rapid diagnostic test) (RDT), record of drug stocks and records of RDT stocks from 1st January to 31st December 2016 were extracted from the DHIS2 database. The indicators permitted assessment in four core areas: availability, completeness, timeliness and reliability. To explore perceptions and point of view of the stakeholders on the performance of the malaria case reporting system, focus group discussions were conducted with health centre nurses, whilst in-depth interviews were conducted with stakeholder representatives from government (province and national) staff and World Health Organization officials who were users of DHIS2.
Results
Data were extracted from nine health centres in Honoria City Council and 64 health centres in Malaita Province. The completeness and timeliness from the two provinces of all nine indicators were 28.2% and 5.1%, respectively. The most reliable indicator in DHIS2 was ‘clinical malaria’ (i.e. numbers of clinically diagnosed malaria cases) with 62.4% reliability. Challenges to completeness were a lack of supervision, limited feedback, high workload, and a lack of training and refresher courses. Health centres located in geographically remote areas, a lack of regular transport, high workload and too many variables in the reporting forms led to delays in timely reporting. Reliability of reports was impacted by a lack of technical professionals such as statisticians and unavailability of tally sheets and reporting forms.
Conclusion
The availability, completeness, timeliness and reliability of nine malaria indicators collected in DHIS2 were variable within the study area, but generally low. Continued onsite support, supervision, feedback and additional enhancements, such as electronic reporting will be required to further improve the malaria reporting system.
| Item ID: | 66619 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1475-2875 |
| Keywords: | District health information systems 2, Evaluation, Interview, Malaria, Reporting, Solomon islands |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
| Funders: | Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) |
| Date Deposited: | 10 May 2021 23:30 |
| FoR Codes: | 32 BIOMEDICAL AND CLINICAL SCIENCES > 3202 Clinical sciences > 320211 Infectious diseases @ 50% 45 INDIGENOUS STUDIES > 4516 Pacific Peoples health and wellbeing > 451614 Pacific Peoples public health and wellbeing @ 50% |
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