The Health Ministry has embarked on the process of preparing a Quality-of-Care Bill to allow patients to access higher standards of medical care.
Kigen Bartilol, Director of Health Standards at the Ministry of Health, announced that the new law will ensure that both public and private health facilities across the country adhere to certified service delivery standards to achieve zero preventable patient mortality.
“It will enable healthcare practitioners to give structured granular assessments to health facilities covering their infrastructural, human resource capacity, processes and procedures,” stated Bartilol.
“When done correctly and by everyone in the institution, we expect patients to receive better healthcare services countrywide,” he added.
He explained that the bill will establish an independent entity to oversee and advise the government on matters of safety and quality in health care, thus guaranteeing a globally recognized certification with a mark of quality.
The medic stated that the country suffers from 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.
The bill seeks to address current gaps in the Kenya Quality of Care Accreditation Framework, which lacks the prerequisite structures for independent, accountable, and credible evaluation of the safety and quality of healthcare.
It will further envisage 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.
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 the quality patient care approach is essential to enhancing Kenya’s health systems and reducing 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,” said Okutoyi.
“This is compounded by escalating care costs, lack of sufficient, suitable equipment, staffing shortages, regulatory obstacles, and expensive medicine.”
She added that healthcare practitioners under the umbrella of 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.
“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 stated.
