IRC developing health surveillance system for Afghan refugees

An updated health surveillance system for Afghan refugees in Pakistan is being developed by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) for the US-based Center for Disease Control (CDC) in order to better respond to their medical needs. "Unless you have a system for collecting information about health, it is very difficult to manage all health aspects," IRC's country coordinator for the health information system, Dr Ishaq Mohmand, told IRIN from the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on Wednesday. IRC is collecting health-related information from Afghan refugee camps located in the North West Frontier, Punjab and Balochistan provinces, where the main concentrations of camps are, and generating country-level reports for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to help detect and prevent epidemics through active surveillance. There has already been a system in place to collect health information, but there were many technical problems in accessing it. "This [new] system is very useful and will be very easy to access," Mohmand said. "We were doing manual calculations, and this was time-consuming," a health programme officer for UNHCR in Pakistan, Naveeda Rehman, told IRIN in the capital, Islamabad. "This new system will give us quick access to vital information." Data related to mortality, morbidity, reproductive health, child spacing, specific diseases, primary health care and referral is being collected from the refugee camps and used to evaluate effectiveness and coverage of health programmes in the field. "If you manage your health system properly, you can help to save more lives," Mohmand maintained. In addition to this new system, IRC is also providing training for staff from 19 NGOs and PDH - a UNHCR and Pakistan government health body for Afghan refugees - on using more than 50 different reporting tools to improve the quality and quantity of data collected from the field. "There are certain reporting and recording tools which are essential in improving the type of data collected," he said. "The training has helped me understand tools and techniques of data collection for improving health-care services and interpreting them for use in programme activities," said Khalid Amin, a computer operator with the Afghan Medical Welfare Association in Peshawar. The IRC would also soon be implementing a disease early warning system in refugee camps in the three provinces as part of the Health Information Systems. Training for this will be planned in collaboration with World Health Organisation and the National Institute of Health, Pakistan.