Newborn Health Data Transfer in the Cape Coast Metropolis, Ghana

Abstract

Newborn data is important for decision making and planning purposes. Data transfer from facilities to district, regional and national levels must have high level of quality to benefit from its use for planning and decision making. The objective of this research was to assess the quality and accuracy of newborn health data transfer from facilities to the DHIMS II application. The study was conducted within the Cape Coast Metropolis. Four facilities (two public and two private hospitals) were selected for the study. Facilities registers were compared with summary sheets as well as the data in DHIMS II. The study revealed that there were data inaccuracies across all the indicators ranging from -46.5% to 89.3%. Percentage errors 1 and 3 were extremely high due to the inability of some facilities to produce aggregated forms. Percentage error 2 was generally low for all indicators as compared to percentage errors 1 and 3 except for institutional neonatal deaths with percentage error of 89.3%. The others range from -1.4% to 4.4% which means that there was very little error in transferring the facility register data to the web-based DHIMS-II. The overall percentage errors 1, 2 and 3 in transfer of the data were 7.5% (95% CI = 6.5% to 8.6%), 43.1% (95% CI = 41.8% to 44.3%) and 3.6% (95% CI = 3.2% to 4.0%) respectively. Newborn health data quality is essential for planning and decision making to enhance service quality.