Transforming Healthcare delivery.
Renowned for providing high quality care, the CSD recently launched a quality improvement programme, to continuously provide systematic changes to work that enables health care to be safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient and equitable. The improvements covers several aspects, including a patient satisfaction survey, the production of guidelines to standardize care and two specific projects – one to introduce sepsis alerts and early treatment; and the other to introduce usage of an Early Warning Score (EWS) to highlight deteriorating patients.Headed by Dr Karen Forrest, Head of Clinical Services, together with the medical students, doctors, ward nurses and staff in the Gate Clinic, the model adopted by CSD is the commonest model used to guide quality improvement projects. From March 2017 onwards, Sepsis alerts were introduced to provide up to date and relevant care to our patients. Simultaneously, the first set of guidelines for the Gate Clinic were published. In anticipation of introducing a scoring system over the last month, the observation sheets on the ward were changed. The patient satisfaction survey in Fajara and Keneba was piloted in May and has being rolled out in Fajara.

The interviewing of patients about their experiences on the ward (and not just in OPD) commenced in October and will be headed by a visiting doctor who will be responsible for collecting the next round of data on the sepsis alerts and take the EWS project forward.

CSD staff were encouraged to join the online training programme through the Open School at www.ihi.org - which is free to MRCG staff to enable CSD staffs to suggest ways of improving their own area of work.

With this project, it is envisioned that the training programme will provide the possibilities of using these methods to introduce operational research into the department. It will further enhance collaboration with other healthcare providers in The Gambia in rolling out successful projects from CSD into the wider health service.