Entebbe 1st June 2016 - The Ministry of Health (MoH) with support from the World Health Organization, United Nations Children’s Education Fund and Center for Disease Control held a three-day training for the members of of Uganda’s armed forces (Military, Police and Prisons) on the usage of Electronic Health Management Information System (eHMIS) at Imperial Botanical Beach Hotel, Entebbe.

The training was aimed at re-orienting the armed forces on using the revised Health Management Information System 033B (HMIS FORM 033B) tool, a health unit weekly epidemiological surveillance report and the eHealth application tools; mTrac and DHIS2.

Dr. Edward Mukooyo,Assistant Commissioner of Health Service Division of Health Information, Ministry of Health officially opened the training and said that information gathering, storage and dissemination is very crucial in decision making. He further said that MoH intends to harmonize all eHealth platforms to develop one centralized data warehouse in the health sector. 
 
Colonel Dr. Emmanuel Shillingi, the Director Biostatistics and Medical Research at the Chieftaincy of Medical Services of the Uganda People’s Defense Forces thanked MoH and partners for re-orienting the armed forces, saying there is a core need for proper information flow to manage health issues in the armed forces. He further said that the training would make the work of health workers in the forces easier. 
 
The training attracted 40 health workers in-charges, data manager and decision makers in the armed forces who are responsible for handling health data. They were equipped with knowledge on data analysis and use at the facility level.  It comprised of a hands-on HMIS tools, focusing on the revised HMIS 033B in particular. They were also oriented on the tools to better appreciate the changes which were introduced and enhance completeness of reporting. 
 
For the last two years, with funding from DFID, the Ministry of Health (Division of Health Information, Epidemiology and Surveillance Division, Pharmacy Division, and National Malaria Control Programme), working with Health Monitoring Unit (HMU), National Medical Stores (NMS) UNICEF and WHO, have been jointly implementing an innovative package of interventions, called Mobile Tracking (mTrac). 
 
MTrac was designed to leverage the widely used mobile phones to implement, at very low cost and at scale, tools to strengthen the existing Health Management Information System (HMIS). Using open source Rapid SMS technology, mTrac captures and accelerates transmission of key weekly HMIS data related to notifiable diseases, maternal deaths, malaria management, stocks and consumption of RDTs and ACTs at both health facility and community level. 
 
WHO continues to provide technical support to MoH to build capacity in reporting and data-use. This is done through trainings of health workers at different levels. The trainings have been done across the country. 
 
At the end of the training, Colonel Dr. Kenneth Ocean Obwot, Deputy Director Medical Services in the UPDF said that information gathering and storage are important for tackling disease, and informing the decision making processes in the UPDF. He thanked MoH and WHO for collaborating to build the capacity of the armed forces health workers. 

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Below:

Health workers from the UPDF trained on report generation using DHIS II

The participants at the meeting