Health facilities

A complete and comprehensive list of health facilities is key to the creation and updating of health catchment area geospatial databases. Master lists of health facilities should contain at least four key attributes:

1) unique identifiers recognized and used by all stakeholders in the health sector;

2) classified based on type and ownership;

3) located geographically through an address system, administrative division, or geographic coordinate and

4) contacted when necessary through phones, fax, or email.13

It is recommended that a health facility master list contains two essential elements – identifying information (signature domain) and service capacity (service domain).14

The effectiveness of a master facility list is determined by the extent to which it is adopted as a national standard and used by all stakeholders in the health sector. Analysis of metadata of trusted users is key to this assessment. Master facility lists are kept in registries (an underlying technology such as a database) that allows for storing, managing, validating, updating, and sharing the master list of health facilities (the content/data itself). A governance structure is required to provide the policy framework that guides the use and maintenance of the master facility list. Mobile objects stored in these lists (e.g community health workers) are generally attached to fixed objects (health facilities) to allow for easier tracking and updates. In some cases, Community Health Workers (CHWs) serve as points of service delivery thus necessitating a master list of these CHWs. Managing these health facility master lists in a common registry is key to the exchange and integration of information across different health programs in both humanitarian and health system sectors and the geo-enablement of health programs within a health cluster. 15

The creation of synchronized master health facility lists is in most cases is hampered by the complexity in naming conventions across organizations and geographies, and within country health systems. This becomes even more complicated when naming conventions are translated from one language to another. In a landmark paper by Falchetta et al.16 on planning universal accessibility to public health care in sub-Saharan Africa, a manual labelling was used to classify health care facilities given the heterogeneity in naming standards across countries in the region. Unique facility-type names were extracted and assigned a tiered value between one and four depending on the national classification standard while adhering to the general convention. Health care facilities were classified into four tiers as show in the Figure 5.

Figure 5: Classification of Health Facilities (Source: Falchetta et al.16)