Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi indicated at the launch that the Department of Health will use the DHB to reflect and reassess its interventions for the coming years. Albeit far from the WHO target, the report indicated that the country's districts were making progress in HIV testing and prevention, prevention of mother-to-child transmission, TB cure, malnutrition and communicable diseases.

Epi Result was involved in the writing of this report by contributing the paragraphs on Male condom distribution rate and Incidence of Sexually Transmitted Infections. The work included reviewing of data from different levels (national, provincial, district) and trends over time.

District Hospital Performance Assessments

This project assessed hospitals across all nine provinces of South Africa over the period 2008-2011. Data on seven indicators were collected: How long on average each patient spends in hospital; The average cost per patient day seen in a hospital; The proportion of beds in hospital that were utilised or occupied; The proportion of deliveries in which a Caesarean section is performed; Facility crude death rate; The number of perinatal deaths per 1000 births; The number of still births per 1000 births. Individual facility data is compared to the national and provincial indicator average values.

Epi Result assisted with the reporting by interpreting the data (trends over time, comparisons with Provincial and National level) of 24 hospitals in the Free State and writing up the results. These have been published in a report in November 2011. 

Analysis of Child Health & Development Indicators

Similar to the hospital indicator project, Epi Result assisted in reviewing the data on 29 child health and Socio-demographic status (e.g. deprivation), Child Development Indicators (e.g. malnutrition), Burden of disease, PHC management and process indicators (e.g. under 5 PHC utilisation rate), Service coverage (e.g. immunisation rate under 1 year), Input indicators (PHC expenditure), Outcome indicators (e.g. diarrhoea incidence), Impact indicators (e.g. stillbirth rate). Data were retrieved from e.g. the District Health Information system, Statistics South Africa population estimates and causes of death statistics, and the ASSA model. The writing up was done and will form part of a larger report.

Besides this contractor work, Epi Result also voluntarily contributed to the District Health Barometer 2010/11 by writing the paragraphs on Male condom distribution rate and Incidence of Sexually Transmitted Infections. This included reviewing of data from different levels (national, provincial, district) and trends over time.

Also in need of extra capacity in epidemiology for one of your projects? Contact Epi Result.

Second, this is an unconventional approach to convey results of (epidemiological) research. I agree with the maker of the documentary Jonathan Smith, a fellow epidemiologist, that "not every public health disaster can be described in numbers". Sometimes you need to see what is actually behind the statistics. In this film he strives to describe the scientific problem, but he also tells the stories of the mine workers who have contracted these diseases. I agree with Jonathan when he says "Statistics are undoubtedly important because they highlight the gravity of a situation. But ‘mortality’ doesn’t simply mean someone dies, it means an individual is removed from a greater, organic infrastructure of family and community. The effect of this removal is something that you can’t relegate to the confines of an academic journal, much less verify with p-values.”

You can see an introductory video to his film here.