INTRODUCTION

The Minister of Health established a committee in 1994 to facilitate the development of a national strategy for the implementation of a comprehensive National Health Information for South Africa (NHIS/SA). The committee consists of the provincial Members of the Executive Council (MEC's) for Health, the Departments of Health, other relevant Government Departments, Academic and Research Institutions, and the Private Sector.

The underlying principles were that:

• The NHIS/SA should be nationally coordinated in order to support the effective delivery of services at all levels of the health system
• The NHIS/SA should be used to monitor the implementation and success of the health priority programmes, both of the Department of Health and the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP).
• Reporting of NHIS/SA data at all levels should be timeous, accurate and complete.

Work by the committee started in April 1995 and the policy and strategy for development was based on five pillars. First, it was to be entirely based on the health policies and strategies adopted for the RDP. Second, it was to be primarily developed by, and based on the consensus between the provincial and national institutions that would be the primary users of the resulting system. Third, the NHIS/SA would be viewed and developed as one parent system, with a number of components systems, governed by nationally accepted standards on the methodology, technology and procedures used for the NHIS/SA development operation. Fourth, the main commodity of NHIS/SA, that is data/information, will be guided by these simple principles:

• Data to be collected at the point of its generation
  
• Data collection is to enable service assessment as well as self-assessment
  
• Service delivery personnel would have responsibility for the collection of data relevant to their specific duties
  
• Where feasible, the basic analysis of the data would be carried out at the point of collection
  
• Collection, aggregation and analysis of data would follow the organisational structure of health services, that is national data would comprise of the sum of the provinces, provincial data of the sum of its regions, regional data of the sum of its districts.

Fifth, whilst the resources needed for the NHIS/SA initial development will be sought and obtained from various sources, the resources for ongoing operation and further development of the various components of the NHIS/SA would have to come from a re-orientation of resources of the respective health authorities at the provincial and national levels.