Improving Maternal Health In The Philippines Essay

Examining the paper: “A system approach to improving maternal health in the Philippines.”

“A good maternal health services can also strengthen the entire health system.” In

spite of that, far from this global objective, the progress of reducing maternal mortality had

been disappointing throughout the years. Unfortunately, this happened in all countries,

especially in developing ones. The Philippines encountered such challenges in a way that the

government has difficulties in straightening its health system according to the needs of its

people. These mainly happened due to 1) socioeconomic disparities where women in the

richest quintile have superior access to health services than the poor and 2) the country’s

geography where many communities

They hold the

authority for actions to be executed and set directions and targets to be achieved.

The weakness of WHSMP2 was the health information system, which lead to

ineffective monitoring and evaluation. Data was manually extracted, which had to be done

by making repeated field visits to the provincial and regional data collation centers and

obtained from multiple national data repositories. This method of data collection would be

impossible if the program was implemented at a national level. A study by Haddad et. al. in

building the national network for the surveillance of severe maternal morbidity in Brazil

indicated that the use of electronic surveillance system improved research by facilitating

complete data reporting and reducing the time required for data collection and analysis.

Even though it is prominent that an electronic system requires advanced technologies such

as internet and computers, and that it would be difficult to implement this system in rural

areas, this strategy could be considered and act as triggers to search for solutions in

improving the health information system and methods for data collection of maternal

deaths in Sorsogon,