Background and Opportunity
There has been several resolutions such as the 2005 World Health Assembly (WHA 58.1) “(4) to formulate, on the basis of risk mapping, national emergency preparedness plans that give due attention to public health, including health infrastructure, and to the roles of the health sector in crises, in order to improve the effectiveness of responses to crises and of contributions to the recovery of health systems;”
In 2018, Tanzania through WHO had the opportunity to collect Vulnerability Risk and Mapping (VRAM) datasets and analyse to inform the country on the vulnerability status in relation to Public Health Emergencies. The Analysis of this data is yet to be published, but the process of collecting this data from its sources, calls up for the need to utilize informatics platforms to streamline collection, analysis and use.
Electronic VRAM aims at establishing an ongoing information cycle at low cost of updating new information and support emergency preparedness at Public Health Level. There needs to be a platform for the integration of data coming contribute to ensuring the continuity of the from different sources to assess, analyze and map vulnerabilities and risks decision making process during the different phases of the emergency cycle
Problem Statement
There has been several initiatives for VRAM around the globe. However, there is a difference of level of implementation that is attributed by lack of capacities of the governments and skills of its personnel to fully taking the opportunity of the digital platforms. Every round of VRAM exercise takes a huge amount of resources to convene stakeholders, training, manual data collection and storage in portable devices, some thing that is not just expensive, but also risky as far as data protection is concerned. Analysis of this data is also time and resource consuming, and in places like Zanzibar where there is a limited analytical personnel, it becomes difficult to arrive to effective and timely information to support knowledge use. Analytical automated systems are needed to streamline the process.
Objectives
The objectives of VRAM is basically to • Identify the vulnerable populations and their respective locations of risk in countries of the region. • Generate awareness and advocacy for disaster reduction and risk management programs to be established/strengthened in countries • Support decision-makers in allocating the appropriate resources for preparedness and response • Promote tools which facilitate coordination and collaboration of potential partners working on disaster reduction in the region. C.H.A.N.G.E has taken a wide scope review around the globe and realize increasing equity can support countries introduced to VRAM update their system to the level of digitizing the whole process, into an eVRAM data warehouse. eVRAM is coming to create permanent linkages that will support monitoring of indicators and automated production of Information.
References
https://www.who.int/hac/techguidance/preparedness/vram_highlights_may2011/en/
https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/78995/VRAM_EHA_EURO_09.pdf