Cebu City - In the conduct of Operation Timbang (OPT) Plus in every local government unit (LGU), an OPT Plus team is organized at the municipal/city and the barangay level. The OPT Plus teams are established with the help of the City or Municipal Nutrition Action Officer (C/MNAO) to manage the conduct of OPT Plus.

The C/MNAOs, midwives, nurses, city/municipal/district nutrition program coordinators, and Human Resource for Health (HRH) will serve as the OPT plus supervisors for the municipality or city. They are responsible in facilitating the organization of the OPT plus team in the assigned areas or clusters. One of their roles is also to verify the viability of the tools to be used during the conduct of OPT, and check if the equipment is calibrated and/or verified.

C/MNAOs are in charge in reminding the barangay OPT plus a team of the scheduled conduct of weighing and height taking every first quarter of the year. They are the ones that organize the OPT plus training and standardization and oversee the spot mapping and family profiling of the area.

Members of the barangay OPT plus team would include the chairman of health, barangay nutrition scholar, sangguinang kabataan officials, barangay health workers, daycare workers, and the teacher in charge. The creation of the OPT plus team in the barangay should be included during the sessions of the Barangay Nutrition Committee meetings.

Barangay OPT plus team shall attend the training designed for them, do household profiling and preparation of spot map, actually conduct the OPT plus with the monthly monitoring of children 0-23 months old with the identified malnourished children who are over 24 months. The quality of data that OPT Plus team collects does not only affect the barangay's nutritional status but also the national data as well. // DMO II Christine Lopez, RND