Part of my outreach work at the district hospitals and health centers is to provide formal feedback sessions every 6 months. On Wednesday, Jill and I gave feedback sessions at 2 of the health facilities I mentor at. We sat down with the department leaders of each health facility to review their progress.
One aim of these sessions is to praise the staff for their good work. For example, one of the health centers had increased the number of children enrolled in HIV care, and increased the number of children on anti-retro viral medications. These are great results--and we told them so.
Another aim of these sessions is to address problems at the facility. Some of the biggest problems these health centers face is constantly running out of important antibiotics, anti-retro virals and laboratory reagents. When we ask each facility about the problem, all fingers pointed to the national medical store supplier, which is the government organization responsible for delivering all medical supplies and drugs to the health facilities.
When we follow up with representatives at the national medical store supplier, they tell basically tell us it’s the fault of the staff at the health centers for not ordering enough supplies.
I’m not sure who is more at fault, but imagine that there are failures on both sides. Facilities need to do a better job of projecting the amount of supplies and drugs they will need over the next quarter, and the medical store supplier also needs to procure enough from outside suppliers--and perhaps most importantly, there needs to be better accountability measures in place at both ends.
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