Title: Monitoring in healthcare management
Course: Health Management, Ethics and Research - Ethiopia (Full)

Monitoring in healthcare management

Monitoring is about collecting information that will help you answer questions about the health-related performance of you and your team. As a Health Extension Practitioner you will be expected to check on how well your activities are progressing. It is important that you record and monitor the services you are providing in a planned, organised and routine way so that you can use this information to report on your team's performance.

What is monitoring?

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Monitoring is the regular observation and recording of activities that will help you answer questions about your team's performance.

Each Health Extension Practitioner needs to keep records and notes, and you should also discuss with the people around you what you are doing in your work. This simple checking becomes known as 'monitoring' when information is collected routinely and systematically against a plan. The information might be about the services you are providing, for example the number of children vaccinated or number of bed nets distributed, or about other activities such as training volunteers and model families, or even organising health education events. You can collect monitoring information on a daily, monthly or quarterly basis. Monitoring also involves giving information to your supervisors and managers about the health services that you are providing for the community (Figure 5.1). For example reporting the number of children vaccinated in the village.

Figure 5.1 Even when you are very busy you need to collect information about the number of people attending your clinic and the reason why they came. This simple form of monitoring will inform your supervisor about the work you are doing. (Photo: UNICEF Ethiopia/Indrias Getachew)

Which of these items should be monitored as part of your work as a Health Extension Practitioner?

- The number of vaccinations given to children in your kebele.
- The number of bed nets distributed.
- The number of people attending your health education activities.
- The number of model families that you have trained.

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In fact all these functions are important parts of your work and should be regularly monitored.

Reporting enables gathered information to be used in making decisions to improve service performance. For example, if monitoring identifies the shortage of bed nets in the village you should report this to your supervisor.