Despite great progress, Cambodia has much to do in order to achieve its goal of nation-wide malaria elimination by 2025. Surveillance and data systems will play a major role in this effort.
Managing a malaria programme involves significant levels of data, including in monitoring and locating cases of the disease and managing stocks nation-wide.
The national malaria programme in Cambodia (CNM) manages case data from a wide variety of sources – including from government health facilities, village malaria workers and private sector practitioners. The programme also monitors stock levels of critical malaria supplies at government health facilities.
Given the complexity of the malaria situation in Cambodia – the variety of conditions and transmission sites in the country – Malaria Consortium identified that no single tool would be able to provide the mix of routine and real-time data required for the national malaria programme. Furthermore, constraints in funding, field-based human resources and technical capacity at the central level, required a simple, sustainable and cost effective solution.
In collaboration with the national malaria control programme in Cambodia, Malaria Consortium developed a diverse set of tools to improve malaria surveillance and to provide the information needed by national and district staff for better management of the national malaria programme. These tools allowed the national malaria control programme to respond efficiently to malaria outbreaks and monitor in real-time the levels of critical malaria supplies at health facilities.
The surveillance tools developed were a mix of routine reporting systems, using information and communications technology, and mobile technology (mHealth) that would enable resource-constrained environments to provide real-time data for immediate action.
Malaria Consortium's new learning paper by Steven Mellor, Moving towards malaria elimination: developing innovative tools for malaria surveillance in Cambodia, documents the lessons learned in developing appropriate tools and specific considerations for the implementation of mHealth solutions. Read the learning paper here
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