By Ivan Belindah
The government has through Reproductive Health Uganda (RHU), UNFPA and DFPA developed software and phone application that will help Village Health Teams (VHTs) in family planning services delivery.
Dubbed the Family Planning VHT Monitoring logistics Tool, the software will capture the data of all activities and services offered across the country by VHT’s.
The family planning services to be monitored include family planning commodity storage, client counseling, ordering for commodities, stocks, and probing how the family planning clients make their choices about the use of different commodities.
Peace Otage, a Digital Specialist who designed the system says it is a simple digital tool to be downloaded that will facilitate real-time data collection in health centers, with capabilities like offline access, to cover and cater for the hard-to-reach areas and easy health Centre assessment.
It will accommodate all levels of health centers from health center II to regional referral hospitals in Uganda.
Demeter Namuyobo, RHU Medical Coordinator, says that the system will help streamline family planning health programming with the help of VHT’s as the key structure to support family planning and reproductive health commodities uptake, to ensure that the family planning structures are functioning to inform policy and decision making at the sub-national and national levels.
VHT Tool screen shot
Seru Morries, MoH Assistant Commissioner for Quality Assurance embraces the App with inbuilt controls especially on the data fed into the system, saying that it will be easy for health care service providers to collect and enter data in the system for analysis.
Roselline Achola UNFPA Program Analysts says that the system if used well, will cut off delayed data collection, planning, and the actual delivery of family planning and reproductive health products to the various health centers in Uganda.
The Ministry of Health and its partners from RHU, UNFPA are piloting the system in 15 districts of West Nile and Acholi sub-regions of Uganda.