A rapid and reproducible picture of open access health facility data in Africa to support the COVID-19 response

South, Andy, Dicko, Ahmadou, Herringer, Mark, Macharia, Peter M., Maina, Joseph, Okiro, Emelda A., Snow, Robert W. and van der Walt, Anelda (2020) 'A rapid and reproducible picture of open access health facility data in Africa to support the COVID-19 response'. Wellcome Open Research, Vol 5, p. 157.

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Abstract

Background: Open data on the locations and services provided by health facilities in some countries have allowed the development of software tools contributing to COVID-19 response. The UN and WHO encourage countries to make health facility location data open, to encourage use and improvement. We provide a summary of open access health facility location data in Africa using re-useable code. We aim to support data analysts developing software tools to address COVID-19 response in individual countries. In Africa there are currently three main sources of such data; 1) direct from national ministries of health, 2) a database for sub-Saharan Africa collated and published by a team from KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme and now hosted by WHO, and 3) The Global Healthsites Mapping Project in collaboration with OpenStreetMap.
Methods: We searched for and documented official national facility location data that were openly available. We developed re-useable open-source R code to summarise and visualise facility location data by country from the three sources. This re-useable code is used to provide a web user interface allowing data exploration through maps and plots of facility type.
Results: Out of 53 African countries, seven provide an official open facility list that can be downloaded and analysed reproducibly. Considering all three sources, there are over 185,000 health facility locations available for Africa. However, there are differences and overlaps between sources and a lack of data on capacities and service provision.
Conclusions: We suggest that these summaries and tools will encourage greater use of existing health facility location data, incentivise further improvements in the provision of those data by national suppliers, and encourage collaboration within wider data communities. The tools are a part of the afrimapr project, actively developing R building blocks to facilitate the use of health data in Africa.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	W General Medicine. Health Professions > W 26.5 Informatics. Health informatics WA Public Health > WA 105 Epidemiology WA Public Health > Health Problems of Special Population Groups > WA 395 Health in developing countries WC Communicable Diseases > Virus Diseases > Viral Respiratory Tract Infections. Respirovirus Infections > WC 505 Viral respiratory tract infections
Faculty: Department:	Biological Sciences > Department of Tropical Disease Biology
Digital Object Identifer (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.16075.1
Depositing User:	Stacy Murtagh
Date Deposited:	14 Aug 2020 09:52
Last Modified:	03 Feb 2022 13:20
URI:	https://archive.lstmed.ac.uk/id/eprint/15254

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