Data Impact Program, Uganda, November 2020

The Data Impact Program (DIP) is a subset of Data for Health Initiative (D4H) of the Bloomberg Philanthropies (USA). The program collaborates with governments to expand the use of data to enhance public health policy making.

Public health policy making includes prioritizing health issues and identifying populations in need, allocating financial and human resources, enacting laws and regulations, and establishing programs and services.

The Data Impact Program partners with governments to integrate data throughout these actions, resulting in better decisions, stronger engagement of stakeholders, and knowledge about the results of these decisions.

In Uganda the Data Impact Program works with the Ministry of Health’s National Institute of Public Health and the African Field Epidemiology Network (AFENET); this has been in effect since September 2020.

• Public Health Bulletin: Technical assistance, training, and financial support to establish or expand a national public health bulletin
• Data to Policy: Training program designed to develop capacity of participants to produce policy briefs, which include robust epidemiologic and economic analyses to enable governments to enact evidence-based health policy changes
• Scientific Communication: Training program to coach mentors to lead participants to develop abstracts and posters for conferences and manuscripts for scientific publication.

• Public Health Bulletin: Operational areas include technical assistance, training and financial support to establish or expand the quarterly epidemiological bulletin. A training has been conducted to train epidemiology fellows on writing a public health bulletin, and this has improved the quality of the bulletin. At least twelve bulletin articles were published as direct products from the public health bulletin writing workshop. Standard operating Procedures for writing the bulletin has been developed and posted on a new website dedicated to dissemination of the bulletin.
• Data to Policy: Data to Policy initiative which trains government health staff to use data to develop policy briefs to support decision making for policy priorities. The first round of this initiative has generated five (5) policy briefs in the areas of malaria, One-health, and immunizations as follows:
• Improving access to Integrated Community Case Management (ICCM) services for malaria in the community
• The magic bullet: using interpersonal communication to increase consistent bed net use in Uganda
• Reclassify anthrax as a public good disease
• Dying rabid: adopting compulsory mass dog vaccination to reduce human deaths from dog rabies in Uganda
• Reduce missed measles vaccination opportunities to save our children

These draft policy briefs originated from epidemiological investigations undertaken in recent times by fellows under the Ministry of Health’s Public Health Fellowship Program

• Scientific Communication. A one week’s training was conducted in early September 2021, from which fifteen manuscripts are currently underway for publication in peer reviewed journals with expert guidance from seven mentors. Products from the Scientific Communication course were also presented at the 7^th National Field Epidemiology conference was held on Fri 29^th Oct 2021 at AFENET conference Hall in Kampala
• There are on-going fortnightly and monthly zoom meetings in which partners at CDC Foundation offer technical support to the Uganda team. Additional support are always provided by the Public Relations Office of the Ministry of Health, regarding communication of public health findings to Ministry of Health staff as well as the general public.
• In the course of the year 2022, there will be additional rounds of training on scientific peer review, public health bulletin writing, policy brief writing, and scientific manuscript writing with new literature produced with each training.