King’s Global Health Partnerships is excited to be partnering with the Ministry of Health Development in Somaliland, the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and the World Health Organisation (WHO) to develop Somaliland’s first national strategy for quality of care, based on the WHO’s recently developed package of resources: Quality of Care in Fragile, Conflict Affected and Vulnerable Settings.
In low resource settings, there are many challenges and constraints to the delivery of quality care. We will bring together relevant stakeholders to understand the current status of quality care in Somaliland, and the challenges and gaps in quality improvement (QI) approaches in the health system. Our NHS partners will support colleagues to undertake facility assessments of Borama Regional Hospital, our newest partner in Somaliland, and up to seven health centres within its referral area, using audit tools developed by WHO.
These facility assessments will help us understand where to focus our support- regarding staff training and the procurement of resources, such as personal protective equipment for health workers. Clinical experts from the NHS will then volunteer their time to provide top-up training to healthcare workers in one priority area as identified in the assessments, such as Infection Prevention and Control or triage.
We will also train 25-35 healthcare workers in the basic principles of QI over a period of five months, building on our long-term partnership with Amoud University. The trainees will develop and implement their own QI projects during this time with support from their QI volunteer mentors.
Though the project is only eight months long, we are hoping this small pilot leads to further work to support Somaliland’s Ministry of Health Development in drafting and rolling out national quality of care guidelines.
