FRONTESPIZIO - Cooperazione Italiana allo Sviluppo

38 Augusto Cosulich, Vincenzo RacalbutoOther activitiesDonor’s technical groups: “Pharmaceutical Technical Group” and“Malaria Technical Group”Two technical groups on Pharmaceutical Services and Malaria Control havebeen started with the contribution of bilateral donors, international agenciesand NGOs in order to assist the drug Authority and the MoH in developinga master plan for the pharmaceutical sector and to control malaria inEthiopia (the major health problem in the country). One Italian expert regularlyattends those meetings on monthly basis.Health Management Information System (HMIS)The primary purpose of an HMIS is to support informed strategic decisionmakingby providing quality data which help managers and health workersin planning and managing the health services; monitoring disease trends andcontrol epidemics; provide periodic evaluation towards agreed targets.The Ethiopian HMIS, though, presents several conceptual and structuralproblems, which limit its usefulness. In the last few years, various workshopsand system reviews consistently identified some of the major ones:• Lack of integration - The HMIS is cumbersome and fragmented. The informationcollected are too many and redundant, which yields to inaccuracyand incompleteness in recording and reporting.• Absence of standards and guidelines - There are no manuals and guidelinesfor processing and interpreting the data. Standard diagnostic andclassification criteria are not available.• Inadequate staffing – The staff responsible for information managementare mostly people with inadequate skills in data collection, analysis and interpretation.• Poor ownership – There is insufficient understanding, both in producersand users of data, of their respective information needs, value and application.Health workers spend a good part of their time in recording andreporting information for which they do not see any practical use.Up to now, the attempts to rationalize the system did not yield the expectedresults. Moreover, in absence of guidance and coordination from the FMOH,various Regions have developed their own information systems which are nothomogeneous and cannot communicate with each other, with consequentfurther fragmentation of the system.