A new digital health mapping tool is being developed in the Pacific to help provide a bird's-eye view of the locations of health facilities and resources such as staff, medicines and equipment.
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is working with Ministries of Health in Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Kiribati and PNG to gather, pin point, and co-ordinate health services and to cut waste.
Acting Principal Pharmacist in Vanuatu, Agnes Mathias, told Jenny Meyer the project is called Tupaia after James Cook's navigator.
She explained how her team have been gathering health information from clinics around Vanuatu to add into the web based maps.
Photo: RNZ / Kim Baker Wilson
Transcript
AGNES MATHIAS: Tupaia is a new project that is with us in Vanuatu now and we are more into collecting data, information about medicines or disaster or any other health information that is required for the health system. So that we can see where our needs are. So this is basically what Tupaia does.
JENNY MEYER: So it's collecting all that information and data and its putting it into like an internet map of the whole country and I think the whole Pacific, is that the aim?
AM: Yes so it looks into getting all this data from each of the countries and putting it on our website on our platform where everyone can look into it. So all this information for Vanuatu, we gather information such as disaster preparedness, availability of medicines, we also do assets in the country, in terms of what health assets we have in the country and some issues on financing, so yes we ask all these questions and these surveys and we gather for Tupaia to collect all this information.
JM: Ok and how are you getting on in Vanuatu? Are you managing to get to some of those little clinics that are in out of the way smaller villages?
AM: Yes we are close to commission there are six provinces in Vanuatu and we have done the two south provinces Tafea and Shefa and by the end of October we should have finished all the provinces in Vanuatu. And its very exciting as its a chance to see what challenges we can see from a pharmacy perspective. We always see first where the medicines are but we are going out we see where the medicine ends. And all the issues that might faced we can see. We go by boat we go by air so its more expensive as well. We have up to 160 health facilities in Vanuatu. Its challenging but its also enjoyable going out to all the health facilities and see where the issues are and also helping the nurses and see how the system works out there as well.
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