The use of routine case record data to evaluate quality of inpatient hospital care in Kenya

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David Gathara: Research Officer, Health Systems Research Group at the KEMRI/Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Nairobi

Presented 1st October 2015, Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, The Unversity of Oxford

The use of routine case record data to evaluate quality of inpatient hospital care in Kenya 

Quality of care assessment is one of the ways of evaluating what the health system is providing and can allow monitoring and evaluation exercises to track progress and identify gaps. Such monitoring, however, depends on an ability to measure quality with the availability of high quality data. In low-resource settings routine health or hospital information system data are very limited, often of poor quality, and summarized. Such routine data very rarely include any information on a patient’s clinical findings or treatment. Thus routine data that are collected do not provide for individual patient level analyses of the process of care. This work is from a group of studies that seek to demonstrate how case record data may be used to evaluate quality of care in routine hospital settings in Kenya and by doing this promote the availability of quality data and its effective use as one means to promote improvement in services provided in Kenyan hospitals.

About the Speaker: David (Bsc. Nursing (Moi University, Kenya), MSc (Epidemiology), London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine)) is a research officer with Health Systems Research Group at the KEMRI/Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Nairobi. He is currently a PhD student, University of Amsterdam. At the KEMRI/Wellcome Trust Research Programme his research work has spanned a range of disciplines including clinical trials, evaluation of quality of care in hospitals and exploration of the application of various statistical methods to routine data. David also hold different responsibilities including being an executive member of the International Epidemiology Association-Kenyan Chapter and in 2015 he was co-opted into the national Ministry of Health technical working group on Monitoring and Evaluation.