How do you collect, manage, analyse, and write up quantitative and qualitative data for a large-scale national research project?
Research Support for WHO Ukraine
Client: The World Health Organisation
Project size: $45 000+
Timeline: 2019 – Present
The World Health Organisation (WHO) employs people at a national, regional and global level to support its work towards enabling the highest possible levels of health for all.
We have worked at a national level with several WHO country offices around the globe, including WHO Ukraine. The WHO Ukraine office has been supporting the Ukrainian Ministry of Health (MoH) to develop evidence-informed national health policies and strategies with the overall goal: to support the Government of Ukraine in its progress towards universal health coverage.
For this project we worked closely with the WHO Emergency and Trauma Co-ordinator, Dr Omar Saleh. We provided a technical support role to Dr Saleh and other WHO staff, bringing expertise and best practises in data collection, analysis and research.
Context
WHO Ukraine began supporting the Ministry of Health in implementing Emergency Medical Services system reform (EMS), aimed at reducing the number of deaths and strengthening the overall capacity of the EMS. As part of this process a large-scale review of the existing EMS was put in place by the WHO.
- The review was to approach a cross-section of different EMS staff and stakeholder groups, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data from participants across the country.
- The data collected from the study was to be analysed from several different perspectives and published by the WHO under several different publications.
- The publications would provide evidence to inform further system reform and decision making within the EMS.
- In total 35 different questionnaires were designed by the WHO to gather data, with 1885 different submissions received, stratified across 12 different participant groups and 25 different regions of Ukraine.
Problem
The WHO were aware that the data they wanted to collect was complex in nature.
They needed support with electronic data collection (through mobile devices and electronic form submission)
They required guidance on best practises regarding management and analysis of the data.
Following this they needed further support for study design, evaluation and technical write up.
Solutions
We reviewed the study design, and implemented the questionnaires designed by the WHO as electronic forms submitted from mobile tablet computers. The forms sent data to a central server hosted by Fjelltopp throughout the data collection phase, with real time reporting to the data collectors in the field.
After data collection, the electronic data was cleaned, validated and analysed by our post-doctorate consultants. This was done using a Python based framework, so that data analysis was configurable, replicable, and version controlled.
Results
The WHO have the flexibility to look at the data from many different perspectives and re-run different analyses with relative ease.
Fjelltopp was responsible for leading the writeup of methodology, results, and discussion for multiple reports published by the WHO. These reports include:
- Emergency Medical Services in Ukraine (2020) - focusing on the Luhansk and Donetsk conflict regions of Eastern Ukraine.
- Adopting a people-centred approach to improve the prehospital care system in eastern Ukraine (2020)
- Emergency Medical Services in Ukraine (TBC) – a national level review focusing on all regions of Ukraine in the final stages of publication.
What our client said about us
“Working with Fjelltopp has been a great experience, the team demonstrated a high aptitude to data analysis, scientific initiatives and leadership, providing continuous research support and proactive follow up.”
Dr Omar Saleh, Emergency and Trauma Coordinator, WHO Ukraine
“There is so much more to Fjelltopp than managing and analyzing data. Their technical expertise, their analytical skills as well as their problem solving attitude is what has allowed WHO Kazakhstan to improve its emergency response and to set new operational standards in managing large-scale health care interventions.”
Dr Caroline Clarinval, Country Representative, WHO Kazakhstan
Contact us now if you need a consolidated space to validate, archive and share your data.
