The IMPACT Health Project provinces of East New Britain, Central, East Sepik, and Simbu are currently conducting Integrated Facility Supervision Checklist (ISC) Assessments at various stages to meet a June 30 deadline in this funding round.
With only a few more weeks to go before the June 30 deadline, survey coverage of Levels 2-4 health facilities remains critical, with PHAs urged to urgently ramp up supervision visits and ensure all checklist data is uploaded to the Tupaia Dashboard.
Each PHA qualifies to receive USD$150,000 (K700,000) from the IMPACT Health Project if it meets this project indicator target in this reporting round.
By June 30, East New Britain as an Early Adopter Province target is to assess 92.4% of its L2-4 health facilities, with a Minimum Service Quality Score of at least 20% over the baseline.
Central, East Sepik Provincial Health Authority-ESPHA, and Simbu Provincial Health Authority as Expansion Provinces are expected to achieve a Minimum Service Quality Score on the ISC by at least 10% over their baseline. All PHAs are expected to assess over 90% of their L2-4 reporting health facilities and achieve a Minimum Service Quality Score of over 60%.
Tupaia data indicates East Sepik Provincial Health Authority-ESPHA has assessed over 55% of its L2-4 health facilities, Central PHA over 29% of its L2-4 facilities, Simbu Provincial Health Authority over 27% of its health facilities, and East New Britain 22% of its facilities to date.
The ISC Levels 2-4 Checklist is a Papua New Guinea National Department of Health’s supportive supervision tool aimed at training and equipping PHAs to provide routine supervision at primary health care facilities (public and churn-run) to improve service delivery quality.
The routine implementation of the ISC will lead to increased transparency and accountability on the delivery of care by facility and identify/address challenges and bottlenecks to improve minimum standards of care at the frontlines – primary health care facilities.
The ISC Checklist consists of various topics focused on the critical areas for quality control including planning and management, human resources, outreach, support and supervision, health information, drugs and essential management, maternal and child health services, communicable diseases prevention and control, inpatient care clinical governance, and infection prevention and control.
During each ISC visits, information is collected through interviews, observations and checking of relevant records/registers/documents at Community Health Posts (Level 2), Rural and Urban Health Centers (Level 3), District Hospitals (Level 4).
Measurement indicators aspire to reflect the health inputs, services and quality standards criteria as recommended by the National Health Services Standards (NHSS).
The NHSS require that a health facility provides specific package of Promotion, Preventative and Referral Health Services and there are adequate essential supplies and good planning, management, information and supervision arrangements.
The checklist a working document that can be reviewed and refined over time. The checklist is being digitized and data is accessible online among other digital health tools which are currently being finalized.