ABSTRACT
Supportive supervision is one of the most important tasks in health systems management. A baseline assessment conducted by the primary health care transformation initiative had shown that the Gurage Zone health department had been conducting regular supportive supervision every quarter for the last five years in Gurage Zone. The study proposed establishing a feedback auditing system as an intervention to routinely assess the progress of previous visit actions included in the written feedback. The finding showed the culture of working on previous supportive supervision action items by woreda (district) health offices were significantly improved
ABSTRACT
Objectives@#Considering the rising menace of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), it is essential to explore the methods and resources that might predict the case numbers expected and identify the locations of outbreaks. Hence, we have done the following study to explore the potential use of Google Trends (GT) in predicting the COVID-19 outbreak in India. @*Methods@#The Google search terms used for the analysis were “coronavirus”, “COVID”, “COVID 19”, “corona”, and “virus”. GTs for these terms in Google Web, News, and YouTube, and the data on COVID-19 case numbers were obtained. Spearman correlation and lag correlation were used to determine the correlation between COVID-19 cases and the Google search terms. @*Results@#“Coronavirus” and “corona” were the terms most commonly used by Internet surfers in India. Correlation for the GTs of the search terms “coronavirus” and “corona” was high (r > 0.7) with the daily cumulative and new COVID-19 cases for a lag period ranging from 9 to 21 days. The maximum lag period for predicting COVID-19 cases was found to be with the News search for the term “coronavirus”, with 21 days, i.e., the search volume for “coronavirus” peaked 21 days before the peak number of cases reported by the disease surveillance system. @*Conclusions@#Our study revealed that GTs may predict outbreaks of COVID-19, 2 to 3 weeks earlier than the routine disease surveillance, in India. Google search data may be considered as a supplementary tool in COVID-19 monitoring and planning in India.
ABSTRACT
In India, only 41.6% of the children are breastfed within 1 hour and 54.9% of the children are exclusively breastfed till 6 months. In order to promote breastfeeding, the first week of August is being observed as World Breastfeeding week. We organized a brainstorming session followed by an Interactive, audio-visual health education event on breastfeeding for the pregnant women and their household members at a Community Health Centre (CHC) in Haryana, during that week. A behavior change communication (BCC) session was held on 1st August 2019 at the Antenatal clinic of the CHC. Target population was the pregnant, lactating mothers and their household members. Needs assessment was done to assess their current knowledge, attitude and needs about the breastfeeding and breast milk, by interacting with them and posing questions. Based on the above needs assessment exercise, we delivered a health education session. The household members were enlightened about their role in breastfeeding. The behavior change communication exercise, tailored to local population and conducted by us would have improved the knowledge, attitude of the pregnant women and their family members towards breastfeeding, and in turn will improve the practice in near future. The exercise is replicable in other settings, by tailoring it according to the local needs.