The Ministry of Health and Sanitation’s (MOHS) Attendance Monitoring System provides the means for facility and district management to ensure staff come to work, and that working staff are paid accordingly.
The system was introduced in 2010 as part of the Government of Sierra Leone Free Healthcare Initiative and has progressed from a basic Excel tool, to now being a cloud-based database with smartphones for amendment requests. Reports are represented on a website (relevant data for users that are logged in), and is to be integrated with the MoHS Interlinked Registry and thus other Health Information Systems (e.g. DHIS2, iHRIS). This fits in with the broader context of information management in health and increasing government oversight and ownership.
Data from the system allows health Management Teams and MoHS Human Resources for Health (HRH) Directorate to track who is working where in near real-time, informing of staff and skills distribution and allowing for MoHS HRH Directorate to find out and take action on staffing gaps and thus make resourcing decisions to make sure that even the remotest facilities are staffed.
The implementation of the current attendance monitoring system improvements is supported by technical assistance from Charlie Goldsmith Associates Ltd., as part of the CHANGES Consortium under the DFID funded project Saving Lives in Sierra Leone.
