PESHAWAR, July 25: The provincial government has slashed the budgetary allocation for district health information system by almost 50 per cent, sources say.
The government has asked the health department to prepare a revised PC-1 of Rs100 million instead of original allocation of Rs193 million for the programme in the current budget for financial year 2008-9.
The budgetary allocation was decreased because several ongoing health information programmes caused overlapping of activities and loss of resources. “The government wants to integrate the ongoing programmes to avoid duplication of activities and loss of resources,” sources added.
The health management information system was first started in 1993 with the financial assistance of USAID and Unicef to collect demographic data regarding 18 diseases for making plans and strategies to cope with the situation.
However, it came to halt in 1996 when the donors stopped releasing funds to it. The project was restarted with the financial assistance of Rs5.5 million of the Women Health Project in 1999. The project had set out ambitious plans of establishing linkages with the districts, but ultimately it again became redundant owing to lack of money after two years.
However, the need for the system was direly felt and the government sanctioned Rs193 million in the current year budget to start district health information system (DHIS) for recording data about prevalence of 36 diseases at tehsil and district headquarters level hospitals.
According to sources, a revised PC-1 worth Rs100 million will be sent to the government within two weeks proposing setting up DHIS cells at district levels to obtain patients’ data from the basic health units, rural health centres and civil hospitals.
The programme is aimed at identifying the quantum of different diseases and devise strategy to cope with them and bring improvement in health delivery.Each of the health facility in the district would record patients’ information on a specifically-designed pro-forma on daily basis for sending it to DHIS.
At present, many departments deal with health management information that resulted in overlapping of activities and loss of resources. Additionally, every project has its own section to collect information regarding specific diseases.
The sources said that through the current ongoing programmes patients’ data was collected through first level care facility, community health programmes, rural health facility and lady health workers programme.
“Under the revised PC-1, integration of all the programmes is being planned to improve output,” they added.
They said that monitoring and evaluation programme worth Rs36 million had already been started on the recommendation of the National Accountability Bureau, which performed the same task.
Furthermore, the federal government had also given final shape to implement the district health management information system (DHMIS) from which the NWFP would also get its share.
In prevalent circumstances, sources said, 10 objectives of the programme had been drawn up that would be divided among the ongoing programmes dealing with health information system.
Components of the DHIS, such as information technology, establishing networking through computerisation of districts with the province and federal health ministry, capacity building of the staff, establishment of data bank would be divided among different programmes.