The Challenges of Auditing in Africa…
on Shona in Sierra Leone (Sierra Leone), 28/Jun/2011 17:04, 34 days ago
I’ve been working on a couple of audits – one on intravenous cannula and intramuscular injection associated infections and one on prescription and administration of quinine for malaria.It’s been aninterestingprocess. Clearly we don’t have an electronic method of tracking the medical notes (yet). The medical records clerks give the notes a separate number once they are filed (separate from the number on the notes when the child is admitted – meaning I have had to search through every single medical record to find all the notes I wanted! I think the clerks reckon I am totally barmy. 304 out of 320 notes isn’t bad though. Especially when the electricity goes off at the hospital and you can’t see anything in the windowless room. I have never been in such a dusty medical records room, and there are occasional cockroaches which come crawling out of the notes I’m looking through….Obviously I’ve been using my computer to go through the data – again having its challenges trying to look through notes to get information in the dark…. and somewhat annoying when the electricity goes off and the computer battery dies (thankfully I’m quite good at remembering to save everything!)They’ve both been long and laborious but I’m finally getting close to finishing them (I hope!) Hopefully they might make a difference to practice at the hospital. I want to say a massive thanks to Mr T and Abdul in the treatment who have collected all the data for the cannula audit and are working so hard for change to cannula insertion practice.