USAID/Angola supports municipal health planning | Source: Gidungo Newsletter, May/June 2013
From May 24 to June 4, the USAID strengthening Angola system health funded project (SASH) supported a planning process workshop at Longonjo municipality in Huambo province. The technical support is focused on building the capacity of municipal health teams to develop, implement and monitor their health plans and budgets, as per the new guidance provided by the Ministry of Health (MOH).This process is part of the main activity of decentralization in the Angola Health Sector aiming to more efficiently man-age resources received at the local level through the Revitalization of Municipal Health Services strategy as released by the National Strategic Health Plan 2012-2025.
Community Health Leaders join together to plan for community health needs
Based on the reports of deaths the past three years, these teams of health municipal department identified weaknesses linked to maternal diseases in the municipalities of Chinjenje, Longonjo and Ukuma, diseases such as diarrheal and acute respiratory infections, as those that cause the most queries and/or preventable deaths. Then, through a process of participatory analysis they chose the services related to these problems that performed poorly and could benefit from greater attention and resources to improve in the next 1-3 years. At the end of the process, the three municipalities produced municipal health plans that will guide health priorities interventions leading to the city from 2013 to 2015.
As requested by the Provincial Health Director in Huambo Province, SASH is in the process to support all of 11 municipalities to produce their priority health plans and budgets, as well as support the Provincial Health Team to plan how they would provide technical support to the municipal teams and monitor the implementation of their plans. This process brought together 20 members of the municipal health teams, including the Municipal Health Directors, to analyze the health information data that had been organized by each health municipality department team with SASH’s support in a previous phase.
Managed by JHPIEGO to help support a sustainable basic services governance system, USAID’s “SASH” project works with municipalities in Luanda and Huambo provinces (the two most populated) to strengthen local planning, implementation and moni-toring of decentralized health services. The goal of the SASH program is to increase the availability and use of high quality services in key areas including family planning, malaria and HIV/AIDS. SASH applies an integrated health systems approach in which higher quality health care services (and, thus, better health status outcomes) are achieved through more affective management processes and institutional-ized quality improvement programs.
