CHPS VERIFICATION SURVEY

March 24, 2018 | News release | Reading time: 3 min

Background:
The Community Based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) initiative – an evidence-based approach to providing community-based care to underserved populations through training and deployment of nurses as Community Health Officers (CHOs) – was adopted by Ghana to increase close to client services in the communities. CHPS brings trained health care workers directly into the communities and rallies community support behind them to ensure acceptability and sustainability of community-based health service delivery. When well implemented, CHPS is a vehicle upon which services can be carried and it provides a way for the country to deliver quality health care for all of its citizens, a goal which has long been sought by the government and a crucial step for Ghana’s development.

The government of Ghana obtained a loan from the World Bank to implement the Maternal Child Health Nutrition Project (MCHNP). This project seeks to improve utilization of community-based health and nutrition services by women of reproductive age, especially pregnant women, and children under the age of two years under the CHPS concept. The MCHNP seeks to facilitate the bottom up planning and delivery process, which fosters dialogue and teamwork between community representatives and service providers, which has been one of the neglected components in CHPS implementation.

CHPS zones initially formed the basis for sharing of resources to support CHPS under the MCHNP. Where a CHPS zone does not have a CHPS compound, the CHPS zone should have at least an operational point of reference such as office working space. It was envisaged that districts would use the funds allocated per zone to make each zone. Data on CHPS zones is self-reported by the districts. There have been some concerns however that districts and regions because the allocation of funds is being linked to CHPS have included outreach points as CHPS. This has cast a lot of doubt on the routine data on CHPS self-reported by the Districts and Regions. It is therefore important that all self-reported CHPS zones are verified on their status of implementation of the fifteen steps to allow for the proper gaps to be established.

Objectives
The overall goal of the verification exercise is to determine the current level of functionality of all CHPS zones in the country and facilitate proper identification of gaps in the implementation of CHPS.

Specifically, the verification exercise has the following objectives:
1.To establish a good baseline of functional CHPS across the whole country to facilitate proper monitoring and evaluation of CHPS implementation.
2.To identify the actual gaps in the roll out of CHPS across the country
3.To provide the basis for allocation of resources for CHPS.

Methods:
The scope of the verification required coverage of all CHPS zones in the country. The PPMED provided an initial list of 5057 CHPS zones to the RDD. However, CHPS zones identified by regions/districts during the data collection period were also verified. The SurveyCTO application was configured on mobile tablets and the Cloud to collect the data. The targeted respondent was the head of the CHPS zone or their designated representative.

Field Organization
For effective management of field processes, the ten regions of the country were divided among the three Research Centres (Kintampo, Navrongo and Dodowa), with each Centre managing the day-to-day field activities in their allocated regions to ensure timely implementation of the verification exercise. Brong Ahafo and Ashanti regions were assigned to Kintampo Health Research Centre. The rest of the regions were allocated between the two research centres (Navrongo and Dodowa)

Progress
Data collection and analysis are completed and report writing is on-going
Funders:
Government of Ghana, World Bank, DFID