Today (July 5), the UKs National Health Service (NHS) turns 70 years old. The much loved system is often reffered to as the 'mother of the nation' for the kind of care it has managed to deliver over the 7 decades of its existence. The UK has achieved quite some milestones that Kenya could learn from.
The key indicators show what is possible with publicly funded universal healthcare that Kenya hopes to achieve in the next few years.
Infant mortality in UK has dramatically decreased in England and Wales since the NHS system was introduced (Source : NHS (England and Wales)
In terms of employment creation the NHS is one of the world's largest employers with the number of people working in the NHS is just under 1.6 million, including thousands of staff supplied by agencies. There were approximately 381m GP consultations in England alone in 2015, according to estimates by Deloitte for the Royal College of GPs (there are no official figures).Of those who saw their GP, 59% were women. The number of practising GPs is 43,605 – with about 36,000 of them in England, meaning that each GP on average deals with approximately 10,000 appointments a year
The NHS is able to spend more than £24,000 to treat a patient with the most severe level of multiple trauma (physical injuries occurring simultaneously in several parts of the body). This is the most expensive of the 1,300 different types of treatment covered by NHS “tariffs”. (Source the Guardian).
However, one of the biggest benefits of UKs universal health care system is the fact that information on patients is shared between medical establishments. This comes in the form of electronic health care records. Even though not every medical center in the UK has completely digitized their records at the moment, it will most likely happen within the next couple of years.
In 2011 we began an attempt to help develop a medical records initiative in Kenya within the context of Kenya's resource constraints. Our goal was that in any hospital encounter, especially an inpatient visit, dozens of individuals—billing clerks, blood lab technicians, consulting physicians, shift nurses would enter the patient medical records and make those records securely available to other facilities in the country. The purpose of this is to make it considerably easier to diagnose and treat patients. However, as the experience in the UK's NHS system shows, there are two key objectives that can be met by developing a secure and efficient medical records system.
The first is to build the system for meaningful use. Electronic Health Records and health information exchange systems are primarily meant to give clinicians relevant information about a patient at the point of care. The secondary use is to provide recommendations from medical literature and reliable access to those recommendations. In other words, to give clinicians information on what treatments have the best chance of working and how they apply to the patient in question. Third is to use those recommendations based on computer based algorithms and reminders specific to the patient.
We are studying the experiences of agencies like the NHS closely to come up with a technical outline of all our local needs in Kenya.
Kennedy Gumbe
www.trd.co.ke
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