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Microplanning
Watch Eric Mafuta explore microplanning as a powerful tool for community engagement, program improvement, and health system strengthening. (Step 2.3)
ERIC MAFUTA: Let’s talk about microplanning. Microplanning is one of the tools that a focus use to ensure that immunization services reach every community. Microplanning is used to identify priority community, to address barrier, and develop work plan with solution. It’s a methodology called innovation in the field of health program. It may be defined as a planning and implementation process, which is people [INAUDIBLE] rely on their decision. Some refer to it as a bottom up planning because the planning starts from lower level unlike more traditional top down planning processes. It’s also known as participatory planning as the community is involve at every stage of the planning. We will begin to define first what the planning mean.
The planning is a management process [INAUDIBLE] about defining goals and objective for future direction to determining activities and the resources to achieve those targets. To meet objective, managers may develop plan, such as action plan or microplan. [INAUDIBLE] defining goals, objectives, and to determine activity in advance. There is different level of planning responsible for different section of planning process. You have what we call strategic planning done by the top level, tactical planning by middle, intermediate, or executive m and what we call operational planning done by junior or proportional level. Here, we have a slide that shows the relationship between this three type of planning. The strategic planning is long-term goals and objective.
We say that is done by top level managers to set up vision of the institution to develop a strategic orientation that can support the organization to evolve in a competitive environment. The tactical planning links to long-term goals and objectives to operational goals. It is carried out at the intermediary level for a lot of country in the provincial level. The operational planning [INAUDIBLE] with strategic goals and objective. It describes goal and objective for each services to contribute to achieve strategic and goals and objective. It’s a short-term planning. Most time annual. What describe activities, such resources, milestone, and condition for success. These three type of planning are related as shown in this graph.
I would like to invite you to watch a video. When watching this video, you have to try to figure out concepts relating to the planning and figure about the following questions. What is the goal of polio eradication initiative? What activities are carried out? What tools and resources are used to achieve the goal?
Now that you watched the video, you can draw on your reading and try to discuss what you have got from this video. And I think that you can just figure out that microplanning is now used in enormous scale and in minute detail. We have also some advantage of use microplanning, Here, you have a picture from– with people who are working together in Afghanistan and trying to make microplanning. We have also some comments from some country about what is the power of microplanning.
But what do we have to understand is that microplanning is a decentralized activity as providers have to work with the surrounding community members to identify location, target population, and each supplement that defines where people are living because it is important to have all this information for a good planning [? implication. ?] And the microplanning is used for simply monitoring immunization activities, outreach program, acute [INAUDIBLE] surveillance, or outbreak response. Let’s go through this type of microplanning. So the first step is to identify location and a target population.
It’s important to identify where you have non-residential location, where you have temporary fixed population, and where you have specific landmarks, such as health posts, border cross points, seasonal settlements, market, school, church, bus station, and order. And you have to answer some question about the population, such as who are there? What are their occupation? How they are dispersed? You have also to answer the question about what is the area like? Is it a urban, rural area? What is the topography because you can have different topography? And you have also, as I say, to identify all population settlements. In the second step, we have to validate sites list using maps. So sometimes, these steps are done at the district level.
So in a district level, the team is work together to try to validate what are settlements we have to take to change name, to remove others, to try to separate what is about the one district to another district. Here, we have in the graph, example from the Mozambique. In the first step, we are prepared local maps. Local maps should include some representation of different settlement area as well as easily recognize important social or cultural space. You can see church. You can see health centers. You can see also made roads and other landmarks. The team use these maps to create daily work to plan and to assure coverage of all the area.
Everything on the map should also be in a microplan and vice versa. The first step is to create daily work plan. During microplanning, health team has to identify priority health centers and communities, identify barrier to access and utilization, and [INAUDIBLE] solution, and prepare a work plan using information that the map and microplan teamwork to set daily plan work. For example, this slide show the day one plan for microplanning area, what area to cover. What is the number of target people? How many vaccinators do we need? What resources we need, and what– who are responsible for this activity? After it, you have to develop logistic and resource plan is to deal with what resource we have.
What will be the distribution points? How many vaccine? What type of cold chain do we need? How to do other supply, such as [INAUDIBLE],, such as water and thermal mugs? And how to carry out mobilization and communication activities? However, microplanning meets a lot of challenges. What we try to [? eliminate ?] here is sometimes they are often outdated, so we are using templates. And these templates are often simplest reset instead of the updating, so we need to adjust for change [INAUDIBLE] situation. We have also the situation where we have a top down process rather than a bottom up process. Sometime a worker creates a microplanning without the participation of stakeholder who know the context.
And we have some compliance bias that can be created without involving existing resources and the community. So we have a set type of challenge that we meet during the microplanning.
Eric Mafuta, MD, MPH, PhD School of Public Health, University of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)
As we will explore through this lecture, microplanning is a particularly powerful tool when used as a mechanism for community engagement, program improvement, and health system strengthening.
During the lecture, you will be asked to watch this video:
This is an additional video, hosted on YouTube.
As you watch, reflect on:
- Key barriers to program implementation that must be considered when planning.
- Why is microplanning an effective way to plan for vaccination campaigns?
After you watch the video on the external website, please return to this page to finish viewing the lecture. Please also take a moment to review the reading linked to this video.
Share your thoughts on the lecture, video, readings, and the questions in the discussion section on this page.
This article is from the online course:
Planning and Managing Global Health Programmes: Promoting Quality, Accountability and Equity
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Planning and Managing Global Health Programmes: Promoting Quality, Accountability and Equity
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