This month, the Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS) and MamaYe undertook a two-week Quality of Institutional Care (QuIC FIT) orientation in nine districts across the country.
The QuIC FIT approach has been introduced by the Reproductive and Child Health Directorate (RCH) and Evidence for Action-MamaYe programme as a rapid, low cost, telephone based tool to assess facility readiness to provide quality emergency obstetric and newborn care (EmONC) services.
QuIC FIT complements the more resource intensive Facility Improvement Team (FIT) assessments, providing data about EmONC status at points in time between FIT visits.
Results are quickly turned into scorecards that can be used to identify immediate actions for quality improvement.
Until now, QuIC FIT data has been collected in four districts in Sierra Leone.
The orientation was led by MoHS QuIC FIT Coordinator Momodu Sesay, and participants included district stakeholders such as the District Medical Officers, Monitoring and Evaluation Officers, Hospital Matrons, the District Health Sisters, representatives of basic EmONC facilities, and other District Health Management Team members.
The district orientation visits involved meeting facility respondents in person, ‘walking through’ the data collection process, and building relationships between the people gathering the data and the facility staff.
It was also important to respond to any queries or concerns among facility staff and to discuss feedback.
We are very excited that for the first time, QuIC FIT data will soon be collected in 13 districts across Sierra Leone.
We hope that support for the QuIC FIT process will become stronger as the District Health Management Teams, hospitals and health clinic staff become more familiar with how QuIC FIT data can be used, and most importantly, how QuIC FIT is not about blame or policing, but a means of monitoring the gaps and working towards quality improvement in health facilities.