PESHAWAR, April 23: The International Rescue Committee, an NGO, is helping US-based Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in developing health information surveillance system for use in Afghan refugee health programmes and other global emergency situations.

“The Health Information System (HIS) is not just about collecting information but processing and analysing the data and supporting it with timely feedback to ensure informed decision making at programme level,” said IRC country coordinator, HIS, Dr Ishaq Mohmand, at a three-day training programme on Tuesday.

“Data related to mortality, morbidity, reproductive health, child spacing, specific diseases, primary health care and referral is being collected from the refugee camps and used to evaluate effectiveness and coverage of health programmes in the field,” he said.

The International Rescue Committee health staff had been engaged in collecting information from 138 basic health units in refugee camps having a population of 1.7 million refugees in Pakistan.

As part of the programme, the IRC master trainers were busy training the staff in the field to use more than 50 different reporting tools to improve the quality and quantity of data collection from the field.