Kalangala – For a long time, Village Health Teams (VHTs) have been carrying huge registers while collecting data on pregnant mothers, children and HIV/AIDs clients, among others.

However, these registers are often exposed to poor safety conditions such as fire outbreaks in wooden buildings at landing sites and rain, which can lead to data loss.

Another hiccup is late submission of the registers. They take months to be delivered to the health facilities, which have to extract data to feed the ministry’s data portal.

Denis Mutebi, a VHT at Kibanga village, narrates that their houses are prone to fires which results in the loss of these registers with the data recorded in them.

“Beside fire, we carry them in boats where rain finds us thus losing them and by the time they dry up, some data is always erased,” he adds.

Now, in a bid to ease data collection, the health ministry has introduced a digitalised data portal/dashboard where every VHT will be able to use a phone to gather the needed health data from communities.

This system of using phones will help the ministry to identify disease outbreaks earlier than it has been.

Dr Meddy Rutayisire from the ministry told New Vision Online that they have so far given out 8,350 phones with the help of the Government to some VHTs in different districts.

“This is an integrated programme where every partner who has access to the dashboard will be able to monitor what is being done from different communities and who has done it to avert duplication of data,” Rutasiyire said. 

Health ministry permanent secretary Dr Diana Atwine launched this dashboard during the opening of the five-day second annual all-partners retreat in Kalangala district on Monday this week.

Senior presidential advisor of population and health Dr Speciosa Naigaga Wandira Kazibwe said late and inaccurate data reporting has been costing the Government a lot of resource allocation on ghost projections.

“Many people link data to mathematics and this is where our weaknesses are because if you look at that data, you always say which population is this and that’s why some of us have taken trouble delving into details of how data is generated,” she added.  

The dashboard doesn’t require internet while submitting which will ease data submission from community health assistants.

The ministry also hopes that by 2025, three of every 10 VHTs will be having these phones.