Abstract
The Ministry of Education (MoE) and Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) have been jointly implementing the health-promoting school (HPS) program since 1998. This program aimed to improve students’ health and education simultaneously. The Department of Health established operating standards and evaluation processes for accrediting schools in four categories (from lowest to highest): bronze, silver, gold and diamond. One of the operating standards, School Health Services (SHS), required schools to maintain student health records and reports used to evaluate the performance of the schools. However, the quality and use of the health data collected as a result of implementing the SHS had not been assessed since the inception of the program. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the situation of students’ health data management system in the SHS. The study focused on data collected from four physical exams namely, growth assessment, vision testing, hearing testing and dental examination, and vaccinations for primary school students. The study design was a descriptive in nature and applied mixed-methods. A stratified sampling approach was used with three strata: the first strata comprised two provinces; the second, nine schools; and the third, 118 informants from the education and health sectors, parents, and students. The data collection approach included in-depth interviews, a questionnaire, reviews of students’ health data and related documents. Descriptive statistics and content analysis were employed for data analysis. The results indicated that the students’ health data collected in both, diamond and bronze level HPSs, was incomplete. This may be because multiple tools were used for recording and reporting students’ health data in sample schools. Furthermore, many of these tools had overlapping content thus increasing the burden of the staff. In addition, it was found that schools did not maintain students’ health data systematically and continuously after receiving the accreditation. Finally, a difference in the priorities of the data collected by the school staff and health workers was observed. While school staff only recorded weight and height data by the MoE, health workers focused on recording health data related their key performance indicators and not those specified by the operating standards of the program. Therefore, students’ health data was not clearly communicated and exchanged between the education and health sectors. This shows that there was no system for managing the data under this program, especially the system for monitoring and collecting data.
