Health ministry prepares new law on quality patient care

Patients will benefit from higher standards of medical care when a proposed quality standardisation bill is passed into law.

The Ministry of Health drafted the Quality of Care Bill earlier this year.

It addresses crucial facets such as infrastructural improvements, optimising health products and technologies, strengthening health systems and fortifying human Resources for Health. 

Dr Kigen Bartilol, Director of Health Standards, Quality Assurance Regulations in the ministry said the new law will ensure public and private health facilities across the country adhere to certified service delivery standards.

“It will enable healthcare practitioners to give structured granular assessments to health facilities covering their infrastructural, human resource capacity, processes and procedures. When done correctly and by everyone in the institution, we expect patients to receive better healthcare services countrywide,” he said.

He spoke at the African Consortium for Quality Improvement Research in Frontline Healthcare (Acquire) Leadership Forum in Nairobi recently.

He said the law will establish an independent entity to oversee and advise government on matters safety and quality in healthcare, thus guaranteeing a globally recognised certification with a mark of quality.

 Kigen said Kenya suffers 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 new law is designed to address gaps in the current Kenya Quality of Care Accreditation Framework, which lacks the prerequisite structures for independent, accountable and credible evaluation of safety and quality of healthcare.

It envisages 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 agencies.

 Dr Lydia Okutoyi, the director of Healthcare Quality at Kenyatta National Hospital and co-founder of 'Acquire' said standardising quality patient care approaches is essential to enhance the health systems to reduce 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,” she said.

Dr Okutoyi said healthcare practitioners under the lobby 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.

She singled out an urgent need for patient-centered experiences like proper registration, shorter queueing times, patient records storage and retrieval, daily feedback by doctors and managers and follow-up visits, conceding that legal certification will be supported by a system-wide cultural shift.

In February this year, Public Health PS Mary Muthoni had said the Quality of Care Bill would be tabled in Parliament soon.

She said it was drafted after surveying 14,000 health facilities.

“The Bill, if passed, will provide guidelines on which services and care will be offered at each facility,” Muthoni said.

She said each health facility is endowed differently in service provision, and with the implementation of social health insurance, there is a need for proper guidelines to determine, which services will be offered where.