In 2015, WHO/UNAIDS published the Global standards to improve quality of health-care services for adolescents. Since then many countries have used the Global Standards (GS) to adapt and adopt them nationally. However, the measurement of standards, in an absence of digital solutions, is a time consuming and costly process. It might be difficult for health-care providers and facility managers to regularly organize self-assessments as distinct activity from their routine duties.
The Global Accelerated Action for the Health of Adolescents (AA-HA!): guidance to support country implementation recommends that standards-driven quality improvement should be positioned within national adolescent health programmes. It recommends that digital solutions are being used to automate the processes of data collection and analysis, and to improve adolescent participation in providing feedback to facilities.
One of the strategic priorities of the WHO's 13th General Programme of Work to ensure healthy lives and well-being for all at all ages is achieving universal health coverage, with a target of 1 billion more people benefitting from universal health coverage. In support of this target, and ensure that every adolescent has access to adolescent-responsive services, the Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health has developed a web-platform for the monitoring and evaluation of national quality standards. Countries can use the web platform to make standards’ monitoring seamless, and incorporate adolescents perspectives regularly – not on a campaign basis – in quality improvement processes.
How does the web platform work?
The AA-HA! reporting dashboard delivers metrics on the performance of a healthcare facility, district or country against the Global standards to improve quality of health-care services for adolescents, or against national standards if such exist.
Each facility will have a unique identification code, linked to a given district, linked to a given country. The facility’ dashboard is designed to report on a total of nine digital questionnaires, each interviewing a different stakeholder in adolescent care:
- Adolescent client exit interview tool
- Health facility manager interview tool
- Observation tool and checklist for facility inventory
- Client-provider interaction observation
- Health-care provider interview tool
- Support staff interview tool
- Adult client exit interview tool
- Adult community member interview tool
- Adolescent in the community interview tool.
Each interview tool is undertaken at a healthcare facility level, with results from many facilities automatically aggregated up to district level, and from many districts up to national level. Due diligence procedures are being followed to ensure that all data are protected, and reported anonymously.
These nine questionnaires are offered each in English, Spanish or French, and are offline-capable to ensure the best possible chance for completion. It is the responsibility of the Facility Manager to distribute these questionnaires to relevant stakeholders.
Analysis, reporting, and quality improvement cycles
Responses to questionnaires are automatically scored according to the defined scoring matrices. Overall scores for each of the 79 criteria and each of the 8 standards are being displayed in dashboards. The platform will generate automatic reports on the performance of the facility, district, country. The report will be sent to the facility manager, district manager, national coordinator, respectively. The users will be able to query the data by time, age, gender and questionnaire type, to generate customized reports.
For each criterion of the standards, the tool will suggest specific actions that might be undertaken by the team in the facility to improve the scores.
Want to join?
To learn more about the web platform for Global standards to improve quality of health-care services for adolescents, and to join, please contact Valentina Baltag baltagv@who.int