School-Based Health Programs
Enhancing the effectiveness of school-based health surveillance and nutrition programs through cross-sector data sharing.
Supporting school-based health programs
By using DHIS2 for education sector data, schools, districts, and national-level stakeholders can easily exchange data with public health programs, or other sectors that use DHIS2 for data management. From socio-economic profiles and attendance data, to information about performance, school feeding and at-risk learners, DHIS2 supports accurately targeted school-based health programs. Sharing data supports school-based surveillance reporting for better coverage tracking and population health.
One example is in Uganda, where this module has enabled better tracking of immunization coverage and joint response to health emergencies, such as Covid-19, Ebola, Measles and Malaria outbreaks, through improved routine surveillance, reporting, and referral at the school level.
Benefits of using DHIS2 for school and health data
- Identify trends and patterns by examining data from many sources—an advantage over single-source or single-sector analysis.
- Cross-sector approach encourages co-design and collaboration.
- Increased resource sharing and reduced duplication of effort lower the cost of data collection and management, and eliminate the need for multiple standalone solutions.
Getting started
School-based health programs can be implemented in DHIS2 in a variety of ways, and do not depend on a full-scale DHIS2-based EMIS. School health data can easily be pushed to the existing national EMIS to provide a more comprehensive perspective of factors affecting student wellbeing and learning outcomes. Successful cross-sector implementation is dependent on data integration between education and health systems and clear terms of reference and data sharing agreements between ministries. The HISP network can support engaging stakeholders in these discussions. To learn more, contact the DHIS2 Education team at emis@dhis2.org.
