Table 2.

Perceived data quality as reported by the respondents, Ethiopia, 2019/2020

Perceived data quality issue	Illustrative quote
Data not recorded on time	‘Staff fill the registration over night when they have information that the supervisors from district health office will come.’ (Focal person)
Wrong recording	‘The patients are taking drugs but are not reported. This creates under reporting. On the other hand, sometimes there is a practice of reporting patients of other diseases’ (Health care provider)
	‘The health extension workers may include and report to us information which is not found in their tally sheet or register. That is what we evaluated.’ (Focal person)
Double counting	‘Yes! There is double reporting in ANC. They are confusing. I mean …ehh…if they did not understand well each other, who didn’t go, who comes there (health centre & Hospital), who is referred, they might report twice. A mother who just got a first ANC service there (health post) and comes for second service (health centre/Hospital) is also reported as first ANC again…’ (Administrative staff)
Data manipulation	‘For instance, nutrition indicators are mostly reported as zero from the health post but sometimes we (the health centre) just put numbers that we think is appropriate by evaluating the health posts previous performance. And sometimes we get reports that are left blank and we just assume that as being zero and we fill the space with ‘0’.’ (Data manager)
	‘So far, we did not come across (any) neonatal death report. However, I could not say there is no neonatal death at all…The weakness here is the death is not correctly reported.’ (Data Manager)
Delayed reporting	‘The report doesn’t come on time, for example the report is closed on 20th and from health posts it will be sent to us from 20th to 22th, we, in turn, we aggregate the health posts report including our health facility and we send the report to district until 26th of every month’. (Data manager)
	‘I would say the data has quality although there is a gap in timeliness. For example, one health post in our catchment area is relatively difficult for transportation. Due to that their report gets delayed for three or four days.’ (Focal person)