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The Gauteng Health Department held a one-day quality assurance summit for front-line managers who are at the coalface of service delivery and working in hospital wards, casualties, clinics and emergency services. The group included nurses, doctors, allied health professionals and support staff (e.g. porters and admission clerks), unions and regional managers.

The purpose of the summit was to:

* Review progress on the implementation of important government initiatives such as the Batho Pele policy, the introduction of the patient charter and service pledge, the patient complaints system and various norms and standards.
* Get input from managers on how to further improve quality service delivery.

The participants noted that progress has been made with formalising patient complaints, building capacity of managers in quality, setting up help desks and innovative approaches to primary health care service delivery. Close to 1 000 written patient complaints from hospitals, clinics, the provincial fraud hotline and head office were analysed in order to give managers information on the trends in the type of complaints and their sources. The most common complaints were on staff attitudes (36%), waiting times (16%), neglect or unacceptable treatment (15.7%) and hotel aspects of services (e.g. linen, cleanliness, etc) - 6%. The existence of the system itself was acknowledged as a milestone, which needs to be built on.

Solutions include improving management and systems, discipline, communication, areas of critical staff shortages, equipment and linen availability. Frontline managers will implement the strategies with the support from institutional, regional and head office managers.

Enquiries:
Popo Maja at 082 373 1169
Hope Huma at 082 555 2302

Issued by: Office of the MEC for Health, Gauteng, 31 July 2001