An Enabling Environment for the Effective Performance of Health Unit Management Committees (HUMCs) in Health Centres in Busoga Sub-region.

Abstract

Health Unit Management Committees (HUMCs) were introduced to provide an eye for the community to monitor and contribute ideas. It was because of poor health service delivery at some health units owing to realizations that community had stopped trusting and using services offered by the government. Health service provision and health sector performance was thus poor presumably because of dismal community monitoring. In this study, HUMCs aired out their views on what they regarded to be an enabling environment for their work to be performed as effectively as possible. A cross-sectional descriptive design was adopted with predominantly qualitative data collection methods. There were 288 respondents from HUMC that were interviewed. Data were analyzed using a computer-based qualitative data analysis software atlas Ti 7. This involved in-depth analysis of each of the main categories of data. The analysis facilitated teams to be able to describe the range of the HUMC member’s skills, training and health centre performance. During analysis, each category was considered for further assignment into subcategories. Using these subcategories gave more insight into the details of the mentors’ and trainers’ activities in each category. Findings revealed that an enabling environment for effective operation of HUMCs should comprise houses at workplaces to boost time management and cater for transport costs. In addition, an enabling environment for the effective performance of HUMCs should be one where hospitals are equipped with drugs so as to have more and more people healed at health centres, and well-regulated information management systems for easy follow up of activities by HUMCs. There must also be attempts to train more HUMCs so as to extend similar services to all health centres. On the side of government, there has to be an improvement in road networks, especially in hard-to-reach places considering that many HUMCs do not stay at workplaces. Conclusively, an enabling environment for HUMCs operation requires the establishment of infrastructure and making the physical work environment as attractive as possible including information management systems. It is therefore recommended that the government continue training HUMCs to increase the scope of health service delivery coverage, the number of HUMCs need to be increased at health centres because in some places, there are just five members yet health centres are very big in some places. Further, there is the need for the construction of houses for HUMCs. The budget design ought to include these requirements in order to boost the speed, effectiveness, and regular rendering of services by HUMCs.