Objective
High‐quality healthcare is essential to ensuring maternal and newborn survival. Efficient measurement requires knowing how long measures of quality provide consistent insight for intended uses.
Methods
We used a repeated health facility assessment in Senegal to calculate structural and process quality of antenatal care (ANC), delivery and child health services in facilities assessed 2 years apart. We tested agreement of quality measures within facilities and regions. We estimated how much input‐adjusted and process quality‐adjusted coverage measures changed for each service when calculated using quality measurements from the same facilities measured 2 years apart.
Results
Over 6 waves of continuous surveys, 628 paired assessments were completed. Changes at the facility level were substantial and often positive, but inconsistent. Structural quality measures were moderately correlated (0.40–0.69) within facilities over time, more so in hospitals; correlation was <0.20 for process measures based on direct observation of ANC and child visits. Most measures were more strongly correlated once averaged to regions; process quality of child services was not (−0.32). Median relative difference in national‐adjusted coverage estimates was 6.0%; differences in subnational estimates were largest for process quality of child services (19.6%).
Conclusion
Continuous measures of structural quality demonstrated consistency at regional levels and in higher level facilities over 2 years; results for process measures were mixed. Direct observation of child visits provided inconsistent measures over time. For other measures, linking population data with health facility assessments from up to 2 years prior is likely to introduce modest measurement error in adjusted coverage estimates.
The Grand Magal of Touba (GMT) is an annual 1-day Muslim religious event that takes place in Touba in Senegal. The city of Touba swells from 800,000 to four million people during the GMT. All patients who attended one of the 154 dedicated medical care public healthcare structures of the medical region of Diourbel during the GMT were included in a cross-sectional survey from November 16 to November 21, 2016. Demographic, morbidity, and mortality data were collected on a daily basis using a standardized article form that allows data to be recorded in a free-text format. Data were obtained from a total of 20,850 healthcare encounters, and 30.9% patients were aged £ 15 years. The most frequent conditions were gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases. Most frequent gastrointestinal symptoms were abdominal and gastric pain, nausea and vomiting, and diarrhea, suggesting that most patients suffered gastroenteritis. The predominance of cough, rhinitis, influenza-like illness, and sore throat among patients with respiratory symptoms suggests that most patients suffered from upper respiratory tract infections. Other frequent symptoms were headaches and pain in various organs. Three percentage of patients were considered to have malaria, 29.8% of patients were prescribed antibiotics and 2.6% antimalarial drugs, and 1.5% of patients were hospitalized. Only one death was recorded. Preparedness of the medical infrastructure should target these syndromic features, in terms of diagnostic tools and specific treatments, including pediatric formulations. It is also essential to improve the quality and rapid availability of data to enable real-time analysis of medical events at the GMT and to implement a rapid response, if necessary.
CHWs have various names, functions, formations and salaries. Their actions appear to have a positive impact both on the therapeutic management of PLHIV and on strengthening health systems. Recognition of CHWs by health systems remains marginal and remains a public health priority.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.