United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in collaboration with Enugu state Ministry of Health have organised a 3-day intensive capacity building workshop for selected health workers from the ministry, health agency and the 17 local governments areas, on Reproductive, Maternal Newborn Child and Adolescent Health (RMNCAH) scorecard development.
The health workers are selected from the policy and planning directorates, of the ministry of health, Health care Agency, Reproductive health, maternal and newborn and the M and Es’ from all the 17 local governments areas, on how to develop accurate data within their health facilities.
Scorecard in this context is ” the tool that helps us to track key indicators with a view to inform decision making at the country health management team level”.
Khalilu Muhammad, Health specialist with UNICEF Abuja country office, who lead the the training team said, “we are here to introduce the concept of Reproductive, maternal and newborn health scorecard to the Enugu health team and also to train the core team that would be developing the scorecard to track how their health interventions are doing”.
Muhammad, noted that one of the key challenges in the health sector is knowing who you are targeting and how to put resources to achieve the maximum result for the benefit of the people.
According to him, UNICEF is for women and children because the organization believes that once women and children are taken care of men also have been comfortably settled.
He said that government spent a lot of money in health interventions but the biggest challenge for them knew where to put this money and also knowing if the money is actually achieving the result that it is intended for.
“The idea of reproductive Maternal and newborn health scorecard is to have a mechanism that on a regular basses monitor how health programs are doing, if they are achieving their results and if they are not achieving their results, it gives an opportunity to check why is the result not been achieved” he said.
It would also help the health workers to specifically find out which area of the health sector that is not doing well and the area that is doing well.
Muhammad said, because health programs are vast and targets on various sectors of health, like children, women, pregnant women, young people and each of these areas are being super intended by specific teams or individuals, for the high level policy makes or the leaders to regularly have an idea at a glance across the programs areas and be able to hold people accountable.
Also for those managing the program it gives them the opportunity to on a quarterly bases look at the scorecard see the areas they are doing well and look at the areas they are not doing well so that they can change their approaches and strategies to perform well across all the areas.
It also helps to improve the quality of data generated because a mechanism to regularly review their data has been developed and whether people are even reporting correctly, you can now score your self.
“Sometimes it could be that people are doing the right thing but they are not reporting it right, or people are reporting what is not happing or not reporting what is happing, either way is a problem for the policy Maker and the planner who is sitting there at the top so this tool helps him to monitor all these thing and be able to come up with targeted programs that address the challenges of the people”.
Ann Oguejiofor, head planning, research and statistics Enugu state ministry of health, who represented the ministry the ministry attached much important to the training hence it decided to shift the training ground from Enugu to Awka to avoid distractions.
Oguejiofor who said the essence of the workshop was to learn how to develop evidence and the use of this evidence developed in planning, pointed out that nothing could be done without having an evidence for one to plan ahead.
“In the health sector we always use data to plan because without data you don’t know the direction where you are going to send your resources, it will also help the health sector to strategies when you have evidence”.
She said that the Monitoring and Evaluation sector (M and Es) from the local governments are the ones that go to the facility level to collect information and transmit to where one can view it at the state and federal levels.
UNICEF consultant, John Quinley who was the resources person gave brief history of RMNCAH scorecard, saying that scorecards were actually developed in Africa, for the African leaders on Malarial alliance as a way of informing heads of States and other high level ministers how their countries were doing in malaria.
RMNCAH programing he said, “became popular, that countries in Africa have scorecards of this order, that UNICEF is happy to bring this system to the states and federal level in Nigeria and is also increasing popular in Nigeria and almost two third of the states now have a scorecard of this type”
He called on the participants to make good use of the scorecard to generate good indicators from the states about how they are using the scorecards to focus on the action and encourage them to put it in the health sector.
