Abstract:
BACKGROUND: Obtaining surgical informed consent from patients before intervention is part
of integral treatment. It reflects to legal, ethical and quality of care considerations. Rwamagana
Hospital is a Level Two Teaching Hospital committed to provide high quality of health services
to his clients. However, the accreditation reports revealed a gap in compliance with informed
consent standard practices and during baseline data we found SIC incompleteness rate of 75%.
METHODS: A scientific problem-solving approach was used for this pre and post intervention
dissertation. The pre-intervention consisted with the retrospective review of 223 SICFs selected
systematically from files of patients who were operated in the period of July to September 2021.
The results were used as baseline to measure the magnitude of the problem. After root cause
analysis, intervention was conducted based on real root cause identified. In post intervention 206
SICFs were used as sample size selected systematically to measure the impact of our intervention.
All data were computed and analyzed using Excel application. To evaluate the statistical
significance of our intervention, chi-square and unpaired T-tests were utilized
RESULTS: In a period of 12 months of implementation, January to December 2022, the
completeness of SIC increased significantly from 25% to 76 % with P value of <0.0121.
CONCLUSION: Without completeness and accuracy of SIC, it gives impression that patients are
not informed on their illness and engaged in taking appropriate decisions on the proposed
interventions. SIC is an important element in clinical medicine and strongly covered by both
national and international standards. Implementation of strategic measures to ensure staff
accountability seem to be the effective for good quality of SIC practices.
