Health Promotion Bureau
6 Weeks
The Health Promotion Bureau (HPB) is the center of excellence in Sri Lanka for health education, health promotion, and publicity of health information. Empowering and mobilizing communities to improve their quality of life through health promotion principles is the main achievement gained during the last few years. They are in the process of strengthening the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of its health promotion work in communities. Mother Support Groups (MSGs) is one such community program where community groups of 7 to 10 mothers are either elected by the community or selected by the Public Health Midwife and other leaders.
Mother Support Groups support health officers by mobilizing mothers to come to clinics, assisting with compliance factors such as mothers taking supplements, drawing the attention of the PHM to vulnerable mothers and children, and a host of other tasks.
The dashboard feature to view and monitor the activities conducted in the districts and evaluate the type of activities undertaken by each mother support community.
Enabling to get a clear picture of other community's activities and processes.
Increase the performance and productivity of the processes by having a peek through to other community happenings.
Providing means to communicate and build relationships.
Mother support communities are spread over different districts, so it’s imperative that Health Promotion Bureau members are able to collaborate with each group as though they are in the same room in order to provide the expected support that community members are promised.
On the other hand, these community members need to work and build relationships with other Mother support group members and stay connected to maximize productivity across the teams. For this, they wanted a reliable system to track and monitor the activities conducted by every Mother support group.
In the process of strengthening M&E, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is identified as a powerful tool to visualize data by spatial referencing, visually disseminate information, as a training tool, and link the activities with measurable public health benefits in communities and districts. Thus, a mobile application was developed to create a visual map with community profiling in the districts, which helps plan and monitor interventions more efficiently.
One of the reasons that the developed mobile application is successful is due to its dashboard feature to view and monitor the activities conducted in the districts and evaluate the type of activities undertaken by each setting in the districts.
Multiple data points were used to track and monitor the mother support groups over time to ensure goals and objectives were met. All of these were achieved through a detailed process of mapping, planning, auditing, and information sharing regularly and now exist as a strategy to evaluate the type of activities conducted by each setting in the districts.
