PESHAWAR, Oct 30: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa health department is launching district health information system (DHIS) by December this year to gather data concerning health indicators and take evidence-based decisions.

The system would start working in 12 districts of the province, which would send information to the provincial office for policy formulation and making decisions accordingly.

The government had launched the Health Management Information System (HMIS) with the financial assistance from the US-sponsored Women Health Project in 1990, but the programme ceased when the project ended in 1996. Meanwhile, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) piloted the DHIS in four districts of Pakistan, including Swabi, in 2002 and sought proposals from the provincial governments to replicate the same in more districts.

In January 2009, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa got Rs90 million sanctioned from the federal government with which it was to implement the DHIS in 12 districts in three years.

The districts included Dir Lower, Malakand, Chitral, Shangla, Kohistan, Haripur, Abbottabad, Hangu, Bannu, Karak, Lakki Marwat and Tank. The Pakistan Initiative for Mothers and Newborns, a five-year USAID-funded project had already started the DHIS in Buner,

Charsadda, Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan, Swat, Nowshera and Dir, which ended in June this year. The provincial government continued the DHIS programme because those districts had already got the services of trained staff as well as stationery, computers, equipment and furniture.

A total of 19 districts are being covered under the programme. Sources said that the only stuff awaited to make the system operational in the targeted districts of the province is stationery, orders for which had been placed with the government’s printing press in May this year.

They said that three reminders had been sent to the press to print the stationery for which Rs3 million had already been paid. Sources in the health secretariat said the DHIS staff desperately required stationery to make the programme operational. Under the programme, the staff and data collectors are required to compile data about the patients’ turnout, number of operations, patients visiting the outpatient departments and those who were hospitalised.

The staff would use 30 tools to compile report about 43 diseases, number of beds and availability of medicines, visits and hospitalisation of women and child patients, status of the availability of blood and other equipment in their facilities.

The sources said that everything except stationery is ready to launch the programme. All the health facilities from basic health units, rural health centres and civil hospitals to tehsil and district headquarters hospitals would compile reports about health indicators that would be dispatched to the provincial office through internet.

These reports would be communicated to the secretary and director-general health so they could have a clear picture about the trend of diseases and the available resources.

The officials said that the information would highlight any problem in data collection in any of the health facilities. All relevant information about health would also be sent to the district coordination officers and authorities at district level. Later, the programme would be extended to rest of the districts to cover the entire province and ultimately convert it into a regular programme of the health department.