Liberia’s Sentinel Sites for Malaria: An Introduction

 

My work in Liberia has been centred around creating sentinel sites.  A sentinel site is a health facility which collects data on some health indicators and send these indicators to a central location to be reviewed so that improvements to the health care system can be made.  In my case, the goal is to monitor malaria.  Malaria represents a significant portion of outpatient visits   (outpatients are those that come to the hospital to see a doctor and leave the same day – inpatients are those that need to stay IN the hospital overnight.  The majority of patients seen are outpatients.) Across the country, malaria is diagnosed in 44% of all outpatients with the most affected being those under 5 and pregnant women.  For this reason, having dedicated sentinel sites is crucial to the understanding of how malaria, and the programs that are being done to manage the disease, is changing over time. 

To bring it down to the simplest system, a sentinel site just needs to know how many of each subpopulation (<5 years old, over 5 years old, pregnant women, etc…) are being diagnosed with malaria over the total number of patient visits each month.  As a result, we get a percentage of X 5 year old children (numerator) over the entire 5 year old children hospital visits (denominator).  Sounds easy right?  It is just about counting each individual as they come into the hospital and then counting them after they have been diagnosed.  This is called “tallying” since we draw a little line when each person comes in and then count the total number of lines each day and add it up for the whole month.  The problem is that it is not as easy as it sounds.

So far we have two hospitals,  Eternal Love Wins Africa Hospital (ELWA) and Martha Tubman Memorial Hospital (MTM).  ELWA is on the outskirts of Monrovia and MTM is in Zwedru.  The goal is to have six sentinel sites running by the end of next year – one in each area of the country as presented below by the National Malaria Control Program.

The tallying system is done by each department: outpatients department (OPD), inpatient department (IPD), emergency room (ER), antenatal care (ANC) and the obstetrics ward.  Each department has a ledger book which is basically a long lined paper book where the clinical notes are summarized.  Each line is a record of an individual visit and within each line certain features, such as name, age, and final diagnosis (plus many more) are written.  At the end of the day, you count the number of patients you have and the number that have malaria.  Seems simple but think of the enormous amount of extra administrative burden this adds to the clinical staff (mostly nurses).  Lets say each line takes one minute to write down since there are many variable to include in the ledger.  In MTM, there are an average of 200 patients per day passing through the walls of the OPD. This means over three hours of care are lost just doing simple administrative work – work that could be spent dealing with patients.  

So sometimes the clinical staff tally after each patient and sometimes they summarize after the whole day.  Regardless, mistakes are made.  Many mistakes.  Data collected in this way is unaccountable and unreliable but I will get to that in a later post.

My philosophy moves the responsibility of this administrative work from the clinical staff to a data entry clerk.  The basic idea is that a data entry clerk would collect the clinical notes from each department and enter the basic malaria-specific fields into a database.  Then, as we would have patient level data instead of large aggregate data.  The patient level data could be analyzed in many ways – more than through an aggregated tallying system.  There is also a sentinel site supervisor that would double check the data to ensure that each record is entered correctly. 

My database was originally created in Excel but the file became massive and the proprietary nature of the software was presenting limitations (some computers have Excel 2003 and some have Excel 2007).  As a result, I have decided to switch to Epi Info and buit the database there and do all the analysis elsewhere – most likely Excel.

What am I measuring?  Here is the list and don’t worry if you don’t understand all the terms but please ask if you are interested:

Outpatient Cases

• Number of total outpatients (<5, 5+)
• Number of outpatient suspect malaria cases (<5, 5+)
• Number of outpatients lab tested for malaria with slides and/or RDTs (<5, 5+)
• Number of outpatient lab-confirmed malaria cases with slides and/or RDTs (<5, 5+)

Inpatient Cases

• Number of total inpatients (<5, 5+)
• Number of inpatient suspect malaria cases (<5, 5+)
• Number of inpatients lab tested for malaria with slides and/or RDTs (<5, 5+)
• Number of inpatient lab-confirmed malaria cases with slides and/or RDTs (<5, 5+)
• Number of inpatient malaria deaths (<5, 5+)
• Number of inpatient anemia cases (<5)

Treatment

• Number of antimalarial treatments prescribed, by type of Tx (<5, 5+)
• Number of days out of stock of commodities, by type of commodity (ACT, slides, RDTs)
• Number of children <5 receiving a blood transfusion

IPTp

• Number of pregnant women attending first ANC visit
• Number of pregnant women who received IPTp-1
• Number of pregnant women who received IPTp-2

As simple as the philosophy sounds, it is fraught with issues.  I have to understand how information moves through a hospital.  What is the volume of patients come through the hospital?  Do the hospitals have a records room and if so, how many (some have an extra one for antenatal care)?  How many beds in the inpatients?  At what times does the hospital have power?  For Zwedru, the power comes on from 10am – 3pm then after 6pm.  There are also fine social dynamics that are played out between the staff and MENTOR as we try to collaborate on getting this data but that will be detailed later as well.

Any questions?

Oh, and for those interested to know what the picture is at the top of the post – it is the hospital records room at the Buchanan Hospital.  Can you imagine trying to find a record there?

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