Improving efficiency of maternal nutrition and infants’ growth surveillance by midwives using electronic application

Background/Aims: Surveillance activity for maternal nutritionand infants’ growth is very important for early intervention ordecision making on nutritional problems of pregnant womenand infants’ growth. Midwives as the primary health care provider responsible in maternal and infant health data surveillance need tools to help facilitate data reporting and reducethe time needed for data collection and analysis. This studyaimed to determine the efficiency of using application compared with using pen and paper in maternal nutrition andinfants’ growth surveillance by midwives.
Method: After training 107 midwives to use the application, eachwas asked to recorded at least 10 first-trimester pregnant womenaged 20–35 years and follow until their infants aged three monthsold. Midwives still conduct the surveillance using pen and paper,also were assigned to record the time needed to fill data in eachvisits for both tools. The time needed since data collection endsuntil the data can be accessed by researchers to be used as surveillance data for making reports were also calculated for both tools.Results: Time needed to fill surveillance data for each visit was30.0±1.5 minutes using pen and paper and 17.1±1.2 minutesusing electronic application (p<0.001; paired t-test). Timeneeded before researcher can access the data was 3 (0–7) daysfor the report using pen and paper while for the report usingelectronic application need no time since the data was automatically uploaded and can be downloaded by the researcherin the same time as it was filled (p=0.001; Wilcoxon test).
Conclusions: The efficiency of using the electronic applicationfor surveillance of pregnant women nutrition and infant’sgrowth by midwives is better than paper-based method. Theelectronic application can be considered to be used in improving efficiency of the national maternal and child health surveillance to support early life nutrition.