USAID Dumisha Afya Hosts Quality Improvement-HIV Forum

Early this month, USAID Dumisha Afya supported a two-day Quality Improvement (QI)-HIV best practice and learning forum in Busia in collaboration with the Department of Health and Sanitation.

The event brought together facility healthcare workers, sub-county managers, the County health management team, USAID Dumisha Afya program staff and the USAID Kenya team. The Busia County Health Executive Committee Member (CECM) attended the event. The event was a hybrid of 70 in-person and virtual participants.

The event's theme was "Using Quality Improvement to Improve HIV Indicators." The goal of the forum was to disseminate and share successes and interventions that had been tested in various facilities; scale-up tested changes; build the capacity of healthcare workers through various learning sessions from guest speakers; and motivate, recognize and reward the best.

Guest speakers discussed topics including:

  • Differentiated service delivery with key highlights on drug decentralized distribution (Dr. Moses Bateganya, USAID Tanzania)

  • Hepatitis in HIV and noncommunicable disease management in HIV (Dr. Wilberforce Lusamaba, physician at Busia County Referral Hospital)

  • Prevention of mother-to-child transmission (Dr. Felistas Makokha, co-chair NyaWest-Western Kenya)

  • Towards achievement of epidemic control among paediatrics and adolescents (Dr. Diana Kemunto, USAID–Kenya AYP Lead)

  • Achieving epidemic control among key and priority population (Leonard Soo, USAID-Kenya)

  • Disclosure (Lilian Lutta, Busia County lead mentor).

Ten quality improvement projects from various health facilities were presented, each focusing on a different key programmatic area: client retention, gender-based violence identification, cervical cancer screening, and TB active case finding.

The facility presentations were evaluated objectively with Busia County Referral Hospital emerging as the winner for implementing a quality improvement approach in viral load uptake. Teso North Sub County Hospital, Khunyango Sub County Hospital, Bumala A Health Center, Port Victoria Sub County Hospital, and Rumbiye Dispensary are other participating facilities.

The County's CECM for Health and Sanitation Beatrice Nakholi attended the event and expressed gratitude to the County and Dumisha Afya as a stakeholder. She reported that the department had prepared and submitted a bill to the county assembly to improve financing and quality of health care service delivery.


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