Reaching all children

[Mollel, Loishiye]

In many developing countries most children are unregistered due many reasons among them is poor birth registration systems. Registration of a child, as close to birth as possible, is important not only as the first legal acknowledgement of a child’s existence, it is critical in making sure the child receives a number of rights and practical needs for example immunizations and access to health care.

 

In countries like Tanzania where in rural areas around 60% of births are taking place at home and around 40% taking place in health facilities. There is a need to have strategies in place to ensure community involvement in making sure births that are taking place at home are also registered. In urban areas almost 80% of births are taking place in health facilities and 20% at home. Again in order to ensure we capture these births strategies needs to be in place to have involvement of the health care system in the registration of births.

 

Tanzania Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MoHSW) has identified this as a challenge and is working with BID Initiative to come up with interventions to ensure all births taking place at home or at health facility are registered so that healthcare workers will know how many children are born in their catchment area so that they can plan better and also identify those who should have come for immunization but didn’t come. Tanzania MoHSW is exploring the involvement of community leaders in the registration of children born at home using SMS and healthcare workers in maternity ward to register all births taking place in the health facility.

 

We would like to hear experiences and lessons learned from others. The idea is to ensure all children are registered as close to birth as possible using a way that is efficient and cost effective without adding more burden to the health system or other government systems.

 

Regards,

 

 

 

Loishiye  Mollel

Systems Implementation Specialist,

Better Immunization Data (BID).

Email: lmo...@path.org

Mobile: +255 767 73 27 10

                 +255 787 20 43 75

Skype name: lmollel1

 

[Tariq Azim]

In Ethiopia, at the community level, the Health Extension Workers (HEW) work closely with the Health Development Army, an initiative of the Federal MOH to establish One-to-five and one-thirty networks of households. Each network has a leader who keeps regular contact with the families within her network. The HEWs regularly meet with the network leaders to discuss about the progress in training families to become "Model Families". Using this network arrangement, the HEW maintains a list of pregnant women who should be followed up for ANC visits and counseled for delivery at the health facility. One of the focus of this Health Development Army is to ensure that all deliveries take place at health centers and hospitals. The HEWs also meet with their supervisors at the Health Center level every month to share information on pregnant women, deliveries and newborns.  USAID and Gates funded projects, like Integrated Family Health Program and the Last 10 Kilometer (L10K) project implemented by John Snow Inc.(JSI) in Ethiopia are assisting the MOH to implement these initiatives.

On the other hand, the USAID funded HMIS project by JSI is implementing an electronic Medical Catalog System (eMCS) at the health center level in the southern region of Ethiopia. This is basically an electronic patient registry, and pregnant women who deliver at the health center are also registered in this system. Currently work is underway to link the community level initiative of listing pregnant women with the health center level eMCS. An electronic registry of all the pregnant women registered by the HEWs in the catchment areas of the health center will be maintained in the eMCS. The system will be able to promptly communicate via SMS the names & addresses of women who delivered at health center to the respective HEWs for (i) conducting postnatal visit within 48 hours and (ii) enlisting the newborns for immunization services. 

Strong linkages between HEW and the Health Development Army and between HEW and the Health Center MCH unit are essential to make such a system work. 

TARIQ AZIMSENIOR TECHNICAL ADVISOR PHONE: 703.310.5163 | WWW.JSI.COM

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[Danovaro, Dr. Carolina (WDC)]

Dear all,

Nicaragua has been implementing a program to promote birth registration. One of the components has been that during some vaccination outreach activities civil registry personnel joins the team. 

A region in Ecuador included the question about birth registration in the vaccination record and vaccinators were trained to ask about this and educate mothers on where to go; unfortunately this was not evaluated and not maintained. 

In Peru, the MOH is providing incentives to health facilities to register all children <6 years into a national registry (it includes a few variables: demographics of the child and mother/caregiver, health insurance type, etc). The database named "padrón nominal" is  maintained between the National Statistics Office and the MOH. Registration has been extremely fast (thanks to the financial incentives mainly) and most districts have included all children born this year.

I also attach an Immunization Newsletter (see also: www.paho.org/immunization/newsletter Dec 2012) that discusses this topic.

Carolina

Pan American Health Organization

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From: bidini...@googlegroups.com [bidini...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Tariq Azim [syed...@jsi.com]
Sent: Monday, November 24, 2014 3:46 AM
To: Mollel, Loishiye
Cc: bidini...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Reaching all children

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bidinitiative/CAMS3jf8%2BfW0FoaWH4%2ByxMtjo_38Bj_vseqaDtEokWB8cwyEUxw%40mail.gmail.com.