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Evaluation of Pilot Personal Data Assistance Devices Program for Community Outreach
One of the major activities of the Private Sector Project for Women’s Health (PSP) is to implement a home-based outreach program with hard to reach population groups, implemented by community health workers (CHW).
Because CHWs visit such a large number of homes, PSP piloted use of Personal Data Assistance devices (PDAs) as a tool for data collection by CHWs. The pilot program had two objectives: to reduce the amount of time required by CHWs for data entry during home visits and to minimize errors in both data collection and data entry. To reach a decision on the feasibility of expanding PDA use with the home outreach program, PSP conducted an evaluation of the PDA pilot program, comparing qualitative information, quantitative data, and costs of use of the PDA compared to that of paper client forms.
The assessment found that paper client forms are a better data collection method than PDAs based on the following key findings:
- Paper client visit forms are easier and faster for CHW to use than PDAs.
- CHW have better interpersonal communication skills when using paper client forms than when using PDAs.
- When CHW used PDAs to collect client information, CHW visited fewer women and had fewer women switching to modern FP methods than when they used paper client forms to collect client information.
The home outreach program should revert to using paper client forms for collecting information from clients during all home visits.
Resource Type : Report
Country : Jordan
Year : 2011-01-15T00:00:00
Language : English
Project : SHOPS