Benchmark feedback meetings in Tanzania successful

Tanzania, February 2011
As in previous years Tragpi together with CSSC organized a feedback meeting for the nine Lake (Victoria) Zone hospitals as part of the Benchmark project. This meeting took place on 11th and 12th February at Bugando Hospital, Mwanza.

New this year was the feedback meeting for the eight participating Northern Zone hospitals from Arusha, Kilimanjaro and Manyara regions which was held on 14th and 15th February at the Rose Garden Conference Centre in Arusha. The main goal of the yearly feedback meetings is to discuss the hospital benchmark results together with hospital managers and other health professionals. Another important goal is to share knowledge about the challenges the hospitals are facing and to exchange experiences on how to improve the quality of care. More than 30 health professionals participated in both meetings. Representatives from all 17 hospitals, among them doctors in charge, hospital administrators, medical officers and data recorders, were present. Furthermore, representatives from the Tanzanian Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MOHSW) participated in the meetings.

Program
After the introduction of the meeting Mecky Isasi, project coordinator CSSC, and Marieke Kleinschiphorst, Consultant Tragpi, presented the project goals and activities, the method used for data collection and the most important findings on data collection and recording. Subsequently, each hospital gave a short presentation of their most important challenges and management activities planned for this year.

The Benchmark results were presented by Steven Lugard, Director Tragpi. By using graphs, the hospital scores on the Key Performance Indicators (KPI's), such as average length of stay, bed occupancy rate and number of surgical procedures per OR per day, were discussed.
In most hospitals from the Lake Zone data has become more accurate and reliable. Furthermore, some of the KPI's, such as average length of stay and bed occupancy rate, showed significant improvements compared to previous years. During the feedback meeting the Lake Zone hospitals agreed to begin measuring a new KPI for pharmacy and to start with a pilot for two other KPI's.
For the hospitals from the Northern Zone the feedback meeting was a first introduction into the benchmark results. The discussion therefore focused on improving the quality and reliability of hospital data. Participants also discussed which KPI's are most relevant for the Northern Zone hospitals. Based on this a selection of 14 KPI's was made.

Finally, the MOHSW gave a presentation about performance management in hospitals. The representative explained the relation between Hospital Reform and performance management. In addition, 4 main areas of intervention were mentioned to improve the performance of and quality care in Tanzanian hospitals.

Coming months
At the end of each meeting the planned project activities for the coming months were discussed. Furthermore, each hospital from the Lake Zone defined concrete actions for this year based on the benchmark results. The hospitals from the Northern Zone agreed to discuss the results of the selected KPI's with their hospital staff first and come up with specific actions to work on these indicators before March 15th, 2011. From May to July follow up visits to all 17 participating hospitals will take place.

Both participants and organizers concluded that the meetings were successful!

Responses from participants:
" We should have these meetings more often!"
" Very interesting, keep it up!"
" Well done!"
" Please continue supporting the hospitals on data management!"