1
Message from Head, SNNP Regional Health Bureau
2 Introduction Health Management information System (HMIS) is one of the six building blocks essential for health system strengthening (WHO and Ministry of Health (MOH) Government of Ethiopia gives due recognition to HMIS as a management support system for improving the health system in Ethiopia by providing continuous information support to decision making process at each decision-making level – Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH), Regional Health Bureau (RHB), Zonal Health Department (ZHD), Woreda Health Office (WorHO) and health facility. At the request of FMOH and funding of USAID, John Snow Inc. (JSI) is assigned to scale-up
HMIS in Southern Nations, Nationalities and Population (SNNP) Region. Training health staff and health managers in SNNPR is one of the essential elements of scaling up HMIS in SNNPR. Health staff are targeted because they are the one who collect, aggregate and report data, and who must also understand the utility and benefits of the data that they collect. Health
managers are targeted so that, on one hand, they can have a thorough knowledge of the HMIS and, thereby, can provide technical support/mentoring to health
staff to properly collect, compile and report HMIS data and ensure data quality. On the other hand, these managers are the users of the reported data and need to have the necessary capacity to understand, interpret and utilize HMIS data for management decisions. The HMIS Procedures and Management Training is organized in three tiers. The first tier is the training of the Master Trainers who will be chosen
by RHB from among Regional, Zonal, and Woreda managers. The second tier is the training of Woreda officials and the third tier is the training of health facility staff. This manual is intended as a Training of Trainers Manual for the first and second tier training. It has been designed such so that the trainers, who belong primarily to the government’s health system, develop appropriate sills to become good trainers/facilitators
during the training period, but also acquire mentoring skills for providing technical support to the health staff during their subsequent routine supervisory visits. Thus, in addition to focus on HMIS instruments, emphasis has been put on overall concept of HMIS, HMIS indicators and their
use in performance improvement, and data quality improvement. This manual has been designed by John Snow Inc. (JSI) HMIS Scale-up team in collaboration with Regional Health Bureau, SNNPR and was pretested in