Institute for Healthcare Improvement
on Freetown Blog (Sierra Leone), 08/Dec/2009 20:50, 34 days ago
Over the past 20 years, I have been involved in a lot of different health service quality improvement projects and my experience has generally been that they promise more than they offer. It was therefore surprising for me to find that the IHI approach to quality improvement that is guiding the 1000 Lives patient Safety Campaign in Wales has sustained my enthusiasm for so long.My interest has continued since I have been here, as it soon became clear to me that the challenges of connecting front line clinical staff with other organisational levels, and making change and improvement sustainable, are faced here just as much as they are anywhere else (as my VSO friend and erstwhile Matron from the Royal London puts it: " the thing is Tim, it's the same old shit, just a very different scale!")Last month, I made contact with IHI and discovered that they have been working on alarge scale project for child health improvement in Ghana. They have been supporting the testing of small scale change ideas to discover which ones result in measurable improvement and are now spreading and scaling up successful ideas. This is probably even more radical in a developing country context than in the UK, as donor-led development projects tend to be very long on high level strategy and very short on how to actually go about sustainable implementation.Over the past two weeks, it has been great  to put Dr Kargbo, the Director of Reproductive and Child Health in Sierra Leone, into direct contact with Nana Twum-Danso, who is leading the IHI project in Ghana. I have been talking to Dr Kargbo about the IHI approach for a while and he was interested to find out more.  It now sounds like the IHI is very positive about the potential to support progress in Sierra Leone - an opportunity to work on health service improvement across the full spectrum from the very top of the UN Development Index to the very bottom. It may be that it takes a while before anything comes of it, if it ever does, but if I have done anything to help it come about, I will be well pleased.