The District Health Barometer (DHB) provides an overview of the delivery of primary health care services in the public health sector across the provinces and districts in South Africa by means of an annual publication. The DHB has been available since 2005 and draws data from the District Health Information System (DHIS), StatsSA, the National Treasury, the National HIV and Syphilis Antenatal Sero-prevalence Survey and the national TB register. It seeks to highlight inequities in health outcomes, health resource allocation and delivery, as well as track the efficiency of health processes across provinces and districts in the country, with particular emphasis on rural, disadvantaged and urban (metropolitan) districts.
An advisory committee to guide the DHB is made up of managers from the Departments of Health at national, provincial and district level, together with health experts and stakeholders from the academic, private and research arenas.
This 2008/09 edition is intended to be an interim product which precedes the more extensive 2009/10 edition. The focus of this edition has been to provide the draft chapters and sections live on the HST website, thus enabling managers and researchers to access the data sooner than if published in hardcopy format. Readers are also able to provide online feedback on the drafts should they wish to do so.
The timeliness of the DHB is inextricably linked to the availability of the resources from which it draws the relevant data. A delay in the release of the StatsSA General Household Survey or in the release of the DHIS data for the year can lead to a delay in the completion of DHB and may even, in extreme cases, result in the information becoming outdated.
The chapters and sections of this report have been released on an ongoing basis since February 2010 as news stories. The full report
is available on the Health Systems Trust (HST) website (http://www.hst.org.za) and on CD from HST.