COHSASA has met with the Namibian Ministry of Health and Social Services to discuss the implemention of a quality improvement programme using CoQIS at two hospitals and a community health centre in Namibia. The discussions are part of a subagreement between COHSASA and Management Sciences for Health (MSH) and USAID. The hospitals involved are the 830-bed Intermediate Katutura Hospital, the Windhoek Central Hospital in Namibia and a health centre.
MSH and COHSASA have agreed to work together to align their activities into one Quality Improvement and Leadership (QIL) programme. The intention is to build on the expertise of both organisations to create synergy that will optimise the inputs to healthcare facilities and lead to more sustainable quality improvements.
MSH and COHSASA have identified the steps that are required to deliver a health quality improvement and leadership programme, which will bring the identified Namibian healthcare facilities to a level at which they could achieve full accreditation, provided that all infrastructure and equipment requirements are in place.
The focus will be to transfer skills to develop local capacity and to provide support to facility leaders on the quality improvement processes to enhance the health systems using both quality improvement and leadership development methods.
It is expected that if the facilities have achieved substantial compliance with the standards, they will undergo an external accreditation survey by a team of surveyors, not previously associated with the programme, around September 2014.
The appointment of COHSASA as the accrediting body for these two hospitals dovetails well with the work that COHSASA is doing to revise the standards being used by mobile clinics in Namibia.