Ministry of Health Prepares New Law on Quality Patient Care

Kenyan hospital patients will benefit from higher standards of medical care when the Ministry of Health finalizes a quality standardization bill and eventually passes it into law.

Known as the Quality-of-Care Bill, it is expected to fill a major gap in health outcomes and instill quality improvement as an organization-wide practice in public and private hospitals in line with the ambition to achieve zero preventable patient mortalities.

Speaking when he delivered the keynote address at the African Consortium for Quality Improvement Research in Frontline Healthcare (ACQUIRE) Leadership Forum, the Director of Health Standards and Quality Assurance Regulations in the State Department of Public Health Dr. Kigen Bartilol, announced that the new law will ensure that public and private health facilities across the country adhere to certified service delivery standards.

“It will enable healthcare practitioners to give structured granular assessments to health facilities covering their infrastructural, human resource capacity, processes and procedures. When done correctly and by everyone in the institution, we expect patients to receive better healthcare services countrywide,” he explained.

He added that it will establish an independent entity to oversee and advise government on matters safety and quality in health care, thus guaranteeing a globally recognized certification with a mark of quality.

Dr. Kigen stated that Kenya suffers a high burden of infectious and non-communicable diseases and has reached a point where quality improvement is crucial to achieving the country’s Universal Health Coverage ambition. It is designed to address gaps in the current Kenya Quality of Care Accreditation Framework which lacks the prerequisite structures for independent, accountable and credible evaluation of safety and quality of healthcare.

The new bill envisages hospital facilities instilling a quality improvement mechanism and culture to enable self-assessment and comply with assessments by peers and external assessors including health insurers, county departments of health, the Ministry of Health, regulators, and certification bodies.

Echoing his remarks, Dr. Lydia Okutoyi, Director of Healthcare Quality at Kenyatta National Hospital and co-founder of the African Consortium for Quality Improvement Research in Frontline Healthcare (ACQUIRE) pointed out that standardizing quality patient care approaches is essential to enhance Kenya’s health systems to reduce preventable mortality.

“Our health system is in a crisis, faced with immense challenges ranging from shortage of staff and medicines to uncoordinated hospital operations, lack of sufficient preparedness to handle epidemics and pandemics as well as a mindset that focuses on disease treatment rather than holistic system responsiveness to patients. This is compounded by escalating care costs, lack of sufficient, suitable equipment, staffing shortages, regulatory obstacles, and expensive medicine,” she said.

Dr. Okutoyi stated that healthcare practitioners under the umbrella ACQUIRE expect the new Quality of Care law to raise healthcare standards countrywide by channeling resources, commitment, investment and persistence by multiple stakeholders including the government, health facility managers, insurers and clinicians.

She singled out an urgent need for patient-centered experiences like proper registration, shorter queueing times, patient records storage and retrieval, daily feedback by doctors and managers, follow-up visits among many others, conceding that legal certification will be supported by a system-wide cultural shift.

“The aim is to curtail human errors, enhance service quality, and improve patient-centered outcomes, shifting our cultural behaviors and departing towards quality, accessible data combined with effective communication and collaboration within and across health disciplines,” she added.

For the healthcare system to succeed, it requires multidisciplinary collaboration between managers, administrative professionals, clinical workers, patients, caregivers, and researchers to improve human factors like knowledge, attitudes, perceptions, values, processes and health outcomes for patients who need care.