I am a medical officer at the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kisumu, Kenya.
I successfully completed the short course on 'Quality Improvement in Maternal and Newborn Health' from March-May 2020 at LSTM, where we were introduced to the concept of 'Quality' in healthcare service delivery and then details into Quality Improvement methods that are used in Maternal and Child Health - Maternal Death Reviews, Perinatal Death Reviews, Near Miss Audits, Maternal and Perinatal Death Surveillance and Response, Confidential Enquiry Into Maternal Deaths, and Standard Based Audit.
The second week narrowed into Standards Based Audit (SBA) - how to develop standards, analysing problems in the workplace and coming up with practical changes that can be implemented via Root Cause Analysis, setting priorities and developing a workplan, and monitoring and evaluation of the whole process; all in the effort to complete the SBA cycle.
I learned that utter commitment into implementing small, practical changes can empower grassroots healthcare workers, especially in Lower- and middle-income countries, to look for their own solutions to common problems, instead of the 'blame approach' of lack of funds and resources to solve these same problems.