Training Workshop on Strategic Planning and Costing for Maternal and Child Health Using the United Nations OneHealth Tool
The training workshop on strategic planning and costing for maternal and child health using the United Nations OneHealth tool was held in Manila from 7 to 10 November 2011.
The meeting was attended by country experts on health systems and from maternal and child health programmes. This included government staff and academics from Cambodia, China, the Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Mongolia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Solomon Islands and Viet Nam as well as representatives from development partners and WHO Country Office staff.
A first session set the scene, providing an overview of planning processes, costing and the role of the OneHealth tool in informing planning processes. This was followed by a number of in-depth sessions on actual use of the tool. These sessions went through three modules: the Health Services module, where users put in coverage rates and associated costs of the actual health interventions that will be delivered; the Health Systems module, in which users put in essential data for health systems planning such as human resources and logistics plans; and the Impact module, in which the underlying demographic and epidemiological submodels driving mortality and morbidity results can be viewed and adjusted.
Sessions then focused on the results of the tool, how OneHealth can be best assimilated with existing budget plans of governments and strategies for developing useful alternative scenarios to guide policy decisions.
The final session was a plenary discussion on the role of OneHealth in strategic planning, with the focus on the reflections of participating countries on the role of OneHealth in their specific country settings and relevant next steps.