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Challenges Faced by Hospitals in Providing Surgical Care and Handling Surgical Needs in Zambia
Abstract
Objectives: To determine challenges faced by hospitals in providing surgical care and handling surgical needs in Zambia. Specifically looking at staffing levels, skills and training, equipment and infrastructure in hospitals
relating to surgical care.
Design: The authors carried out a non-intervention cross sectional study. The study further looked, post operative care, proportion of male to female patient, surgical cases not catered for, number of operations done, and
availability of anaesthetic drugs. The design was both quantitative and qualitative. For quantitative data collection the questionnaire was used to determine the outcome of certain variables. While for qualitative the questionnaire and information audit was done from the theatre register.
Results: In all the hospitals surveyed, staff raised a number of challenges that hinder them in offering adequate surgical services to their clients. The problems include; lack of briefings about surgical services (9.1%), lack of training (11.7%), and low staffing levels (9.1%), lack of specialized equipment (15.7%) was also a major problem cited by most of the staff and lastly but not the least the lack of drugs required to conduct a successful operation was named as a big hindering factor (3.9%).
Conclusions: The challenges faced by hospitals may be higher than explained because things like funding, accommodation, and training among others were not discussed in this study. However the major challenges have been highlighted which seem to support the literature review. The findings such as critical shortage of essential surgical staff, inadequate funding, poor state of health facilities and equipment, inadequate development of social support systems for fostering health
programmes, insufficient empowerment of communities to improve their health, poor geographical access, especially rural areas, and inadequate systematic research in alternative and traditional medicines.
relating to surgical care.
Design: The authors carried out a non-intervention cross sectional study. The study further looked, post operative care, proportion of male to female patient, surgical cases not catered for, number of operations done, and
availability of anaesthetic drugs. The design was both quantitative and qualitative. For quantitative data collection the questionnaire was used to determine the outcome of certain variables. While for qualitative the questionnaire and information audit was done from the theatre register.
Results: In all the hospitals surveyed, staff raised a number of challenges that hinder them in offering adequate surgical services to their clients. The problems include; lack of briefings about surgical services (9.1%), lack of training (11.7%), and low staffing levels (9.1%), lack of specialized equipment (15.7%) was also a major problem cited by most of the staff and lastly but not the least the lack of drugs required to conduct a successful operation was named as a big hindering factor (3.9%).
Conclusions: The challenges faced by hospitals may be higher than explained because things like funding, accommodation, and training among others were not discussed in this study. However the major challenges have been highlighted which seem to support the literature review. The findings such as critical shortage of essential surgical staff, inadequate funding, poor state of health facilities and equipment, inadequate development of social support systems for fostering health
programmes, insufficient empowerment of communities to improve their health, poor geographical access, especially rural areas, and inadequate systematic research in alternative and traditional medicines.
