ORGANIZATION
CORE Group
USAID
YEAR PUBLISHED
2002
DESCRIPTION
This guide is for managers, field supervisors, and others who plan, monitor and evaluate community health programs. Most often, the people who have such a responsibility also have to collect data as one of their tasks. The guide will aid them to train others in a simple and rapid method for collecting data to use for planning, monitoring and evaluating community health programs. The method is called Lot Quality Assurance Sampling (LQAS). LQAS has been used by industry for about 75 years for quality-control purposes. But it has been adapted for use by community health practitioners over the past 15 years. LQAS is now used all over the world in community health programs for the following purposes: (1) assessing coverage of key health knowledge and practices in maternal and child health, family planning, and HIV/AIDS; (2) assessing the quality of health worker performance; and (3) assessing disease prevalence. This guide presents LQAS in a very user-friendly way so that almost any supervisor or community health worker can be trained in how to use the method for the first purpose mentioned above—which is the most often-used application.