Children are hope for our future. A healthy nation needs healthy population to excel in physical and mental aspects and be productive. It also has to spend less in healthcare if population is overall healthy. Moreover if disease has to occur we need to catch it early. This will result in early treatment of the issue and most likely decreased disability with more productive years to the over all national productivity.
World has developed several methods of evaluating the trends in health and that results in data predicting outcomes in terms of disease burden, health care burden, future need assessment and economic and financial burden.
We know through developing strategies that surveillance of the population is a must as it gives us a background data for our need assessment and economical burden among other things.
Pakistan is one of the largest populated countries and among the countries who lack quality healthcare provision to its majority population. It also lacks the documentation of the needs for health care as well as data collection for the surveillance and morbidity and mortality trends.
Our healthcare resources cannot be allocated appropriately because of absence of real documentation and assessment of healthcare needs. Recent trends in healthcare information and data collection instruments has given us hope that we can fill this important gap of need assessment.
We picked up few parameters to monitor as part of regular health screening and are trying to create a system to be put in place for a continuous documentation and interpretation of the data. This involves school going kids till they leave school. We are adopting a model that is less resource intensive and is capable of perpetually continuing with low resources. The reason was that this has to be carried out in area with low healthcare and Government penetration. Secondly this is an unchartered area on a mass scale and people are not easily convinced regarding feasibility of this kind of effort.
This with the passage of time will collect data that will become meaningful due to the volume. It will describe the trend, the need, the burden and the requirement for the policy making, research and audit reasons.
In the central database, the data will be pooled together and various outputs will be obtained. It will also show the difference in areas and also will be able to see trends on the macro level. We have opted for this data collection to start from the area of Chitral. We have worked with one school there already on another project called creating leaders project. We have trained them on how to measure these parameters. Then we will focus on other schools and when we will feel confident in our data capture, will offer this software to other schools in other parts of Pakistan.
With this sort of data collection, we can pick the individuals in need for further evaluation or treatment and then also be able to look at the trends. Those abnormal trends will require bigger change and possible state level interaction to produce dent in the problem identified. We will share the progress of this program later and will also share what we learned from it.
I can be reached at erdoc@shifa.com.pk