“We visited again!”
Christian and Mark have just returned from a very successful quality assurance and project review visit to Tanzania. They were warmly received for this 10-day trip, revisiting the 8 Northern Zone hospitals involved. Although COVID has been difficult, for the most part we are delighted by the health of the project. The established services continue to grow, with a fantastic 471 hernias repaired ‘in project’ as of 15th November. Equally pleasing and important, is that the clinical outcomes remain excellent.
Work on the eRegistry has been substantial in the lead up to this trip. The test site was live for the local surgical teams to ‘walkthrough’, with mock patients created and managed. The feedback was excellent, and the local teams are keen to get going with it. With just a handful of minor modifications left to action now, we are hopefully just weeks away from full deployment.
There has also been some further organic expansion of centres, with a new centre added to the ‘Korogwe Hub’ in the months before our visit. One of the Korogwe Town Hospital surgeons was redeployed to the Majengo Health Centre. They have been able to take the TNMHP service model with them to establish a service there too. This is such excellent news, strongly endorsing the methodology of the project.
There were of course several challenges to be faced and a number of issues were unearthed. The most pressing of these currently revolves around the ongoing difficulty of getting all the required equipment to the centres that need it (principally the temperature specific autoclaves and diathermy machines). But we will continue to remain positive and work innovatively towards resolving these issues.
Although this project is not just about repairing hernias (we are supporting surgical development holistically), it was a pleasure for us to support the Muheza team tackle a tricky recurrent hernia on the final day of our visit. It was a great way to finish, epitomising why this work is so important.
Our thanks to all the centres, teams and supporters who embraced us and enabled the trip.