National Data Management Center Held Training on Burden of Disease for Ministry of Health and EPHI Staffs

National Data Management Center for Health conducted training for Ministry of Health and Ethiopian Public Health Institute (EPHI) staffs on Burden of disease. The training held at EPHI’s Training center for three days starting from March 10-12/03/2020. “The training is aimed at introducing Global Burden of disease scientific methods and tools and identify priority areas for health policy action,” said head of National Data Management Center Dr. Alemnesh Hailemariam on the opening of the training. She added that the training is important to impart knowledge and skill of Burden of Disease methods and analysis as well as health and health related data relevance in influencing policy and action. “The culture of data sharing with in EPHI should be dramatically improved” said Dr. Alemnesh.

In her opening presentation, Dr Alemnesh stated that there is poor evidence on cause of death in Ethiopia and such training has paramount importance to create awareness of data sharing and exploration for the betterment of evidence based policy action. Dr. Awoke Temesgen, the advisor of NDMC and Burden of Disease at EPHI presented Global Burden of Diseases experience and methodology tools International Health Metrics and Evaluation estimated cause of death worldwide. “We have to maximize data use in order to better estimate cause of death in Ethiopia” said Dr. Awoke. He added that data is wealth for health and all stake holders should give hand to fill national data gap.

Fellows of Global Burden of Disease from Washington University also presented experience, methods and tools Global Burden of Diseases uses to estimate cause of death which the participants found interesting. Generally, more than 30 participants from EPHI, Ministry of Health and Washington University took part on the training.