Cebu City- True to its words, the National Nutrition Council Region 7 is now poised to distribute promised weighing scales to Local Government Units (LGUs) who have recently trained their barangay nutrition scholars on the Basic Course for Barangay Nutrition Scholars and/or the World Health Organization-Child Growth Standards (WHO-CGS).
The distribution of the monitoring tools as part of the region’s campaign for capable frontline nutrition workers with a functional standard monitoring tool is a bid to improve local monitoring of children’s nutritional status, a venue for the local nutrition committee to identify priority beneficiaries.
As an incentive to local nutrition committees who have allocated resources for capability building of their barangay nutrition scholars, the region hits two of the most prominent monitoring problems at the local level.
Various monitoring activity results show that LGUs have a relatively high malnutrition rate in their Operation Timbang results not only because of the declining nutritional status of children but also because, in some instances, frontline nutrition workers have not undergone appropriate capability building activities such as the WHO-CGS training or are not aware of their roles and responsibilities as learned from the Basic BNS Training Course.
In addition, the limited number of standard, functional weighing tools is also identified as a cause of error, with a number of LGUs still using bathroom scales and the rest using old and weathered hanging weighing scales, making the distribution of these weighing scales a good regional investment.
Allocating three hundred ten (310) weighing scales for twelve municipalities all over the region, the weighing scales funded by the Department of Health RO 7 will be distributed to the municipalities of Larena, Enrique Villanueva, and Siquijor in Siquijor Province, Sta. Catalina and Manjuyod in Negros Oriental, the municipalities of Pilar, Mabini, Trinidad and Buenavista in Bohol as well as the municipalities of Carmen, Dumanjug and Tuburan in Cebu province. //NGS
