News
Bringing together district-level data for better maternal and newborn health decisions in West Bengal, India
published 15 May 2015
published 15 May 2015
The DIPH will enable district health stakeholders – local government departments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and private health providers – to share data and use it in decision-making and planning for community health.
Three recent Government of India health reports have identified data quality and use as a problem, and the need to strengthen data-management as a priority [1]. If data-sharing in districts – the lowest effective administrative level of decision-making in the Indian health system – can be improved, there will be opportunities to reduce duplication, make better use of resources and meet community health needs more fully.
The IDEAS project is based at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and will work on the DIPH in collaboration with the Public Health Foundation of India. The project is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The primary objective of the DIPH is to encourage district-health stakeholders to use local data for:
The DIPH is to be tested in the area of maternal and newborn health. It will bring governmental and non-governmental service providers to a common forum on a regular basis, in order to share maternal and newborn health data according to an agreed plan. The DIPH will be implemented using novel tools:
The DIPH will be evaluated based on the following questions:
Although not being studied in this research, the DIPH could potentially be a way of getting data to evaluate the success of maternal and newborn health innovations through the development of an implementation strength score. A score is developed by comparing the effort put into implementing an innovation and the health outcomes within a population.
For more information about this study, please contact the study lead: Dr Bilal Avan, bilal.avan@lshtm.ac.uk
1. HMIS (2015b). Fact Sheets – Maternal and Child Health Indicators (2013-14 & 2014-15) – West Bengal, MoHFW; the State National Health Mission (2015); National Health Mission (2015) Approval of Program Implementation Plan 2014-2015 – West Bengal, Department of Health and Family Welfare, Government of West Bengal.