Opportunities and Challenges in Public Health Data Collection in Southern Asia: Examples from Western India and Kathmandu Valley, Nepal

Sustainability

Anobha Gurung¹  Perry Sheffield²  Gulrez Shah Azhar³  Dileep Mavalankar⁴  Ajit Rajiva⁵  Amruta Nori-Sarma⁵  Michelle L. Bell⁵ 

[1] Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA;Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health and Department of Pediatrics, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029, USA;Pardee RAND Graduate School, Santa Monica, CA 90401, USA;Public Health Foundation of India, Indian Institute of Public Health—Gandhinagar, Gandhinagar, Gujarat 382042, India;School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511, USA;

关键词: capacity building;    data collection;    hospital admissions;    India;    mortality;    public health;    Nepal;    South Asia;   

DOI  :  10.3390/su9071106

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Small-scale local data resources may serve to provide a highly resolved estimate of health effects, which can be spatially heterogeneous in highly populated urban centers in developing countries. We aim to highlight the challenges and opportunities of health data registries in a developing world context. In western India, government-collected daily mortality registry data were obtained from five cities, along with daily hospital admissions data from three government hospitals in Ahmedabad. In Nepal, individual-level data on hospital admissions were collected from six major hospitals in Kathmandu Valley. Our process illustrates many challenges for researchers, governments, and record keepers inherent to data collection in developing countries: creating and maintaining a centralized record-keeping system; standardizing the data collected; obtaining data from some local agencies; assuring data completeness and availability of back-ups to the datasets; as well as translating, cleaning, and comparing data within and across localities. We suggest that these “small-data” resources may better serve the analysis of health outcomes than exposure-response functions extrapolated from data collected in other areas of the world.

【 授权许可】

Unknown