In a dynamic and an everchanging world with many health issues and more sprouting every day, quality and proper health data management is an important aspect. In health data management, numbers are very important. For example, numbers point to when, what, where and how many cases of a particular health condition could occur. This helps in health policy formulation, planning and categorization of health conditions.
Recently the world has suffered a pandemic of Covid19. How did this infectious viral disease come to be categorized as a pandemic? Well, numbers of people who got infected with the Covid19 virus were reported from almost all over the world. Oh! hail numbers! The disease spread across continents and countries making it a pandemic. Because of the numbers of cases and deaths related to Covid19 virus were high, the entire world stood with immediate goal of circumventing the pandemic
Policy makers subsequently came up with policies, or standard operating procedures (SOPs) to prevent new infections; some countries went into lockdowns, face masking, social distancing and hand washing were among the policies that were formulated. Health planners in all countries had to mobilize and allocate resources to fight off this pandemic. Quarantining, treating infected persons in intensive care units and vaccination campaigns were also planned to boost the fight against this pandemic.
Let’s take another look at a disease common in Uganda, Malaria. Malaria is categorized as endemic in Uganda. This categorization is because malaria is always present in the population and numbers of people infected with malaria are registered almost every day. Therefore, health planners have to always allocate resources to fight this endemic condition in Uganda. Policy makers on the other hand also use the health data on malaria to formulate preventive measures for every region in Uganda.
Central to the disease surveillance and associated planning discussed above is health data that is driven by proper comprehension of numbers. Hail numbers advocate and present to you the data in its highest quality to facilitate optimal health in populations. With Numbers, you will not only tell what and where the problem is, but also how much and when the problem is because numbers don’t lie!