Arun Singh
Early Times Report
Jammu, Mar 16: The Health Department has miserably failed to implement Health Quality Assurance at health facilities level by not constituting quality teams to assess the facilities being given to the patients and necessary feedback to improve the performance.
Sources told Early Times that in order to make certain the health facilities at hospital level the District Quality Teams were required to function at District Hospitals further in-charge of Health Facility has to form an Internal Quality Assurance Team.
"But astonishingly, in majority of hospitals at district level these teams were no constituted as a result, no assessments were conducted during the period 2011-16. A quarterly feedback was to be taken on a structured format by the Hospital Manager as patient satisfaction survey and this feedback was to be analyzed to see the lowest performing aspects and further actions were to be planned accordingly," they said. They further informed that no patient satisfaction surveys were conducted in districts of Doda, Rajouri and Udhampur under the Quality Assurance programme, all health facilities were to establish procedure for death and medical audit. While death audits were to be conducted or all deaths happening at the facility, medical audit and prescription audit was done on a representative sample drawn from medical records. Emphasis was to be placed on maternal and infant death audits and also death/ failure/ complication following sterilization. "Around 20 maternal deaths and 250 infant deaths had occurred at facilities in three districts of Doda, Udhampur and Rajouri during the period from 2013-14 to 2015-16 but no death audits were conducted and also these deaths were not reported to District or State Quality Assurance Committee. Also no medical audit and prescription audit had been conducted on a representative sample drawn from medical records of the Facilities," they said. |
