Improve health units to decongest referrals

Improve health units to decongest referrals

What you need to know:

  • The issue: Access to referral hospitals
  • Our view: Streamlining the referral system should not deny patients access to referral hospitals but provide all the necessary equipment, services and accessories at lower health units.

The Ministry of Health has said it will no longer accept to treat patients who just walk into regional referral hospitals without referral letters from lower health facilities (see Daily Monitor, April 27). According to Dr Anthony Mbonye, the director general of health services, patients who are not referred are causing confusion at referral hospitals and are clogging the entire healthcare system.
Ideally, a national or regional referral hospital is meant to handle especially complicated or critical illnesses. However, this is not what pertains in the country’s healthcare system.
In the quest for better health, patients suffering from whatever ailment, some as simple as flue, will visit any health facility to access treatment. As such, the ministry’s plan to streamline the referral system is long overdue.
Nevertheless, for the ministry to successfully achieve its objective, there are issues that it should take into consideration. For instance, does it bother the ministry to see that in spite of the presence of lower health facilities – health centre IIs, IIIs, and IVs, many patients still throng regional referral hospitals in search of treatment? In here lies the elephant in the room.
Streamlining the referral system should not start and end with denying patients access to referral hospitals. This should begin with the ministry taking cautious steps: Providing all the necessary equipment and accessories—syringes, razor blades, tickets, gloves, pens, stationery, etc. required at health units.
The second one is to ensure all lower health units are satisfactorily stocked with the required medicines. The ministry should ensure that patients who visit health centres get the services they deserve and not walk away empty-handed or at best, after being served just painkiller.
Thirdly, lower health centres should have healthcare professionals who attend to patients as and when they visit. When patients do not get services when they visit parish, sub-county or constituency health units, they will have no alternative but to throng referral hospitals where they expect to get better services.
Besides, the ministry should go an extra mile and ensure that medical personnel across the board, especially those serving in the hard-to-reach areas, are adequately motivated to boost their efficiency and commitment to work.
In many cases, patients, including pregnant mothers, have visited health centres only to find no nurse, midwife or doctor to attend to them. This is absurd.
In a nutshell, ring-fencing regional referral hospitals should not be done mechanically by merely blocking access yet this can best be achieved methodically through improving the lower units.