APPENDIX 3
Dr Michael Taylor, Senior Adviser, Environmental
Health
Communicable Disease & Environmental Health Policy
Public Health Directorate
Ministry of Health
Brief outline of the area to which this evidence
is referring to:
A collaborative programme of water quality management
capacity building involving collaboration between the New Zealand
Ministry of Health, the World Health Organisation Western Pacific
Region Office and the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission
using a framework of public health risk management planning to
improve the quality of drinking-water supplies financed by AUSAID,
NZAID and NZ ODA.
Name of the country/region this evidence is referring
to:
Pacific Island and Asian countries, especially
Tonga, Cook Islands, Vanuatu, Palau and Fiji.
The evidence will focus on:
— Co-operation, co-ordination
and capacity-building between and water operators, governments
and donors (including public-private and public-private partnerships).
The WHO/ SOPAC/ NZ Ministry of Health aid programme
to the Pacific Island Countries (PICs) mirrors the programme of
assistance to remote, deprived rural communities developed for
New Zealand communities by the NZ Ministry of Health. Agreement
as to the respective contributions of WHO, SOPAC, the NZ Ministry
of Health, and government and private sector agencies in the PICs
is negotiated by the WHO and SOPAC. NZ Ministry of Health provides
the technical expertise fo rimplementing the capacity building
programme.
The capacity building programme operates within
the framework of the Public Health Risk Management Plans (PHRMPs)
developed for each of the drinking-water supplies participating
in each of the PICs.
The PHRMPs (Water Safety Plans in WHO terminology)
that are being used in the PICs and in small water supplies in
New Zealand involve the following stages:
— identification of public health
risks,
— ranking of the severity of the
risks,
— establishing what remedial and
preventive actions can be taken to manage the risks,
— writing a formal plan listing
the risk-mitigating actions that will be taken, and when,
— identifying the risks which
it would be desirable to manage but which cannot currently addressed
because of resource constraints,
— identifying and documenting
the monitoring programme that needs to be carried out to evaluate
the success of the plan,
— identifying the timetable for
revising the plan.
The monitoring that is carried out involves
both:
— checking that the actions required
by the plan have been carried out competently and on time,
— monitoring the effects of operating
the plan eg improvements in drinking-water quality, changes in
health statistics,
The PHRMP is used as the framework for identifying
and ameliorating the public health risks that the water supply
may give rise to, and is later used to guide the optimisation
of the water treatment, storage and distribution processes.
Because the plan identifies and ranks the risks
that cannot be managed using the available resources it provides
a useful tool for evaluating the most useful forms of further
aid to improve the quality of PIC drinking-water supplies to supplement
the initial aid programme. The inbuilt performance monitoring
component provides a useful tool for ongoing assessment of the
effectiveness of the programme.
One major disadvantage of some of the aid programmes
operating in the region is that they are too short-lived. A contingent
of aid workers arrives in the recipient country for a short period
and provides the country with equipment and rudimentary training.
Often little thought is given to the sustainability of the programme.
Examples that have been seen include failure to provide operating
and maintenance manuals for equipment, failure to check that an
ongoing supply of operating materials is available, etc. In some
cases, disposal of non-operational aid materials poses a major
waste management problem in the recipient countries.
October 2006
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