A Dissertation Report submitted to the School of Public Administration and Management in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Award of the master degree of Health Systems Management (MHSM) of Mzumbe University.
Background: This study conducted to assess the quality documentation/information in clinical data at various levels of health facilities in Mbeya City Council. The study explored various factors contributed to poor quality documentation/information in clinical data at various levels of facilities within the Council, using its objectives related to the title of the study, findings from various studies, or efforts reflected it, and other evedences towards magnitude of the problem world wide, National wide, and at the Mbeya City Council specifically. Methodology: The study employed descriptive research, whereby data collected from 100 respondents using simple random and Purposive sampling techniques. Methods used to collect data were questionnaires, personal interview, and focused group discussion. The data collected from 97 out of 100 targeted by researcher including 60 health service providers from health facilities, 28 CHMTs and health facility in charges and 9 health service stakeholders. The descriptive statistics and in particular frequencies and percentages were used in reporting the findings based on views from respondents. The data was presented in tabular form with frequencies and percentages. The researcher used the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS version 20) to analyse the relationship between the variables under study.
Results: The study found that there is consideration of Education/knowledge level and work experience of a particular service provider when allocating staff, as reported by CHMT and head of 4 health facilities (2 private facilities, while 2 are of public ones) by more than 62% of the respondents employed. The study also revealed that present infrastructure and building are not enough to support data/information activities, hence contributing to poor quality documentation practices, as recommended by researcher on Kenya‟s study, 2008. The study further found that data management training schedule present (training time) is enough for service providers and CHMTs to collect and analyse data in a Quality way and that supportive supervision (from CHMT) intervals are enough (helpful) on daily data management. The study found that patients/customers are open and cooperative enough to give their true particulars all the time needed to do so and that
Communities/ customers have good response when asked to keep their used clinical information materials. CONCLUSION: The study recommended that there should be deliberate efforts in training health workers on the practice of clinical quality documentation and the training should be intensive in a way that it helps in knowledge accumulation of the health workers.