August 2001
Project: Capacity Building of Health Professional in Health GIS

Background

A structured training in the use of GIS in health systems helps the professionals to support the goals of strategic decision making, managing facilities and providing utility services, monitoring diseases, respond to inquiries for information, conduct studies and making recommendations to leaders and document health care needs of a community and assess resource allocations and to plan and target interventions.

Keeping the above in mind, CSDMS was approached by key health organisation to develop a capacity building programme for managers and decision makers to use GIS for mapping, analysis and decision-making. CSDMS had been involved in key researches on use of GIS for the Health sector. CSDMS conducted a need assessment to assess the training requirement of health sector professional and build a training programme for the professions that included representatives from government health departments and policy makers, health planners, representatives from international organisations and key NGOs, managers from hospitals involved in large-scale health service delivery programmes.

Methodology

CSDMS also organised and conducted a three-day training programme from 1-3 August 2001, for these professionals on the use and relevance of GIS in health along with a hands-on trainng in the use of GIS in decision-making in Health services. The training programme aimed at strengthing the knowledge level of the professionals. The training content was prepared after assessing the needs of the target group and in a manner that the participants could easily comprehend and could use their skills for the maximum benefits.

Summary

While the possibilities that can be explored though GIS are limitless, depending on the skill and imaginative use of the researchers and the willingness of health sector management to resource its implementation, the training mainly included equipping the professionals with a clear understanding of the ways and methods in which GIS tools could be used for analysis of health issues and building action plans for delivery of effective health services. The training focused on how to apply GIS to support the goals of strategic decision-making using spatial technologies to develop a coordinated and well-networked system of all the health service units of a region, analyse spatial and temporal trends, document health care needs of a community and assess resource allocation, plan and target interventions and publish health information using maps on the Internet.

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