What is a population census? A population census periodically counts each person in a country – or any defined geographic area – on a specific day and records where they live, what they do and other relevant personal characteristics. Some advantages of a census are: A census generates essential population data to calculate multiple health
Image by geralt from Pixabay What is demography? Whether on a global scale or for a small geographic area, the demographer’s task is to answer questions about: the number of people in a population at a point in time,;where they reside; how they distribute at least by age and sex; how these numbers have changed;
What are qualitative methods? Analysis of social data are crucial for health programme managers to understand why and how people make choices and the way they behave. In contrast to quantitative methods that rely on counts of the occurrence of a phenomenon, qualitative methods look for patterns in opinion and on subjective explanations of human
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay What is public health surveillance? Public health officials coined the term surveillance to describe the systems they set up to watch out for and control the occurrence of health threats. Just as the police set up closed-circuit television devices and community watch programmes to detect and prevent crime, public health
What is a HMIS? A health management information system (HMIS) collects, stores, analyses, and evaluates health-related data from health facility to district, regional and national administrative levels. It provides analytical reports and visualisations that facilitate decision making at all these levels. HMIS are also referred to as routine health information systems. A HMIS derives much
What are household surveys? Surveys describe changing population health data which other sources cannot provide. Surveys can, for example, measure the extent of undiagnosed chronic diseases in a population, and their risk factors. This is especially important in situations where people do not access or cannot access health facilities in which health workers can diagnose
. Why health systems collect data National governments maintain health information systems to inform and monitor the running of their health systems. The World Health Organization categorizes health information as one of six health-system building blocks alongside: service delivery; health workforce; access to essential medicines; financing; and leadership/governance. Health information systems operate at all administrative
Why ethics and data? Where there is power, there is ethics. Unethical practices often entail misuse of power. Misuses in health range from a physician not informing her patient about the risks of a procedure she will perform to the manager of a public health data system not protecting the confidentiality of patient records. Patients
World Bank Group. Sources: Wikipaedia.org; opendatahandbook.org; worldbank.org (image cropped) What are open data? The World Bank Group. Sources Wikipaedia.org; opendatahandbook.org; worldbank.org (cropped image) The Open Knowledge Foundation defines data as open ‘…if anyone is free to access, use, modify, and share it — subject, at most, to measures that preserve provenance and openness.’ The open
How can we trust the data? Users of data, and of information based on the data – whatever its source – need to distinguish data that are reliable and trustworthy from those that are inaccurate or misleading. This is possible when data producers follow agreed principles and procedures for collecting and analysing data and when