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GPHC gets support to improve quality care
With support from HealthQual through the Centre for Diseases Control (CDC), the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) is gearing to considerably improve its operation in terms of the delivery of health care.
According to the GPHC’s Quality Improvement Manager, Yolanda Renville, the collaboration has thus far helped steer the hospital’s quality programme in the right direction.
The GPHC’s Pharmacy in operation mode.
It was earlier this year that the GPHC introduced a Quality Improvement Department with Renville at its helm. She disclosed that although the hospital had quality programmes in place they were however scattered throughout the hospital.
“So basically what we are doing is bringing all of our programmes together so that we have more aggressive control of our operations,” said Renville who disclosed that it was against this background that the hospital was identified to gain support from a safety expert. The expert who was this week slated to commence sessions with staffers within the Maternity Unit was expected to help with addressing some priority gaps.
According to Renville there are systemic gaps that have been found within the operation of the hospital which, she noted, could contribute to the failure to “speedily deliver a certain type of care, to certain types of patient within a certain time.”
With the HealthQual support, Renville said, “We will be sitting with them (officials) and looking at our system with respect to some of the complaints we have been receiving and then fixing them from an expert point of view.”
Already the GPHC has been working to improve its level of quality care through the introduction of a number of projects which have targeted the Pharmacy, the Maternity Unit and even the health centres which fall under the purview of the hospital. These, according to Renville, are objectives that can be improved simply by ensuring that efforts are made to have staffers adhere to certain practices.
And according to Renville intervening measures were in fact instrumental in realising a noticeable decrease in the waiting time at Pharmacy between May and August. Previously, the Quality Improvement Manager said that the waiting time at the hospital’s Pharmacy was about 45 minutes to one hour but has since been reduced to about 15 to 30 minutes at the most.
“We found that we needed to deal with the situation where persons were waiting for very lengthy time just to utilise the service of the Pharmacy,” said Renville who disclosed that on an average busy day the facility is tasked with catering for close to 400 patients.
And there were also improvements noted in the Maternity Unit after efforts were made to track and address a situation whereby discharged patients were found to be returning with infections.
According to Renville, “Through surveillance we were able to notice a few of our patients coming back with different types of infections …they would have had surgery. They left the hospital well, their wounds were healed and when they go home we don’t know what happens but they kept coming back with infections.”
She explained that usually an infection will surface within 72 hours but these patients were returning weeks after being discharged raising concerns about the conditions in which they dwell.
But according to Renville, “Basically what we did was to start an education campaign at that particular unit (Maternity) and that was spearheaded by the Nurse Manager there…because of that campaign we were able to reduce that infection rate by eight per cent in the period of three months,” disclosed Renville.
According to her the GPHC is in fact on a mission to continually improve its quality of care so much so that it has undertaken a number of customer relation sessions for all level of staffers with a view to ensuring that they are able to effectively offer quality service.
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