Project News

The first Monitoring Meeting was held from 4th to 6th of February 2013 in Dodoma, the capital city of Tanzania, as a bi-annual monitoring event to share the performance of Regional Health Management Team (RHMT) and progress of project activities. The total number of participants was 122, including representatives of 25 regions, counterpart officials of the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MOHSW), representatives of Prime Ministers' Office – Regional Administration and Local Government (PMO-RALG) and Development Partners. From each region, three RHMT members and a Medical Officer in Charge of regional referral hospitals were invited. For a notable point, it was the first time for the new region members to join the project activities.

The following were the notable features of the meeting;

• Sharing the progress of RHMT activities in the first and second quarter of 2012/13
• Incorporation of pre-on-site training sessions of Regional Management Supportive Supervision for Council (RMSS-C) tool.
• Inclusion of sessions as part of the council level resource management training (finance) where an officer of the finance section of the MOHSW presented the issues of and future vision of health financing at the council level. The good practices of Community Health Fund (CHF) from two districts, Kyela district from Mbeya Region and Chamwino district from Dodoma region, were also presented.
• Inclusion of presentation from JICA’s Human Resource for Health Strengthening Project on the utilisation of HRHIS (database for human resource management)
• Collection of inputs from Medical Officers in charge of the Regional Referral Hospitals on the hospital management issue based on the revised document “Functions of Regional Health Management”
• Collection of inputs from Medical Officers in charge of the Regional Referral Hospitals on the Regional Management Supportive Supervision for Hospital (RMSS-H) Tools.

The meeting captured the status of progress in the five months following the RHMT Annual Review Meeting in September 2012. Through the submission status and contents of the quarterly progress report of each region, the monitoring results were shared based on the Project Design Matrix (PDM) indicators (see detail in the Project Achievement based on PDM). One of the outstanding accomplishments was that all regions could manage the submission of the second quarterly report of 2012/13 in due time after struggling for a long period of time to meet this obligation.

In addition to monitoring activities, the follow-up of the previous training programs was also conducted by using questionnaires and group discussions to monitor the degree of dissemination among the team members and utilization of the contents of what they gained to their daily duties. Furthermore, the members of JICA's Human Resource for Health Strengthening Project presented the concept of the project and importance of RHMTs' roles in collection of data on human resource data-base in order to contribute to the well-balanced human resource allocation across the country.

Following this meeting I have come to realize that the members' understanding and commitment tor their duties has increased. In addition, I felt that relations of coach and coachee (person receiving instruction from a coach) have naturally been built among RHMT members of different regions and rings of such mutual learning spread to several folds at this meeting.

(Written by Makiko Komasawa/ Senior Health Advisor and Health Management)

All Participants

The Scene of the Plenary Session

The Session of Regional Referral Hospitals' Medical Officer in Charge