Analysing patient information flow in hospital as a factor to a long waiting time. Case study: university teaching hospital of Kigali

Abstract

This study was conducted primarily to analyse the patients‟ information flow in hospital as a factor to a long waiting time at Kigali teaching hospital. The reason is that the government of Rwanda has provided effort to make healthcare services more accessed but it has been remarked that there are still gaps in different hospitals. We can give an example of UTHK where patients are still experiencing delay during the health care process. So, our research interrogated whether the problem is based on patient information flow or other factors. To achieve research objectives, we followed a methodological approach and collected data from 365 patients who were selected basing on scientific techniques. Key informants namely 15 medical staff and 3 electronic medical records system administrators (ICT staff) were questioned. Each category of the population had its own questionnaires in order to obtain various responses from the participants. In summary, three themes were explored: challenges in healthcare process due to patients‟ data flow, bottlenecks in patients‟ information flow and plausible strategies for existing bottlenecks in patients‟ information flow. Overall, the majority of the patients wait a long time to get healthcare services they need. 101 patients (27.54%) revealed that they spend 2 to 3 hours to get services they wanted whereas (42.75) waited more than three hours. This long waiting leads the patient to be unhappy and hopeless hence their level of satisfaction becomes nil. Different places where patients spend more times than other places have been highlighted. As such the department of emergency, pharmacy and cashier are noted. For the department of radiology, two places were also pointed out: consultation and cashier. Different reasons were developed for this long waiting. These include demeaning the patients, poor customer care; physicians being busy with other businesses and less care about the job. Others include a big number of patients compared to existing medical staff, insufficient materials and the use of multiple information record systems that report the same patient information. The real factors associated with this long waiting are the following: slow in treatment process, staff not responding on time and long patient queue. Some strategies were proposed to deal with the problem. Those are for instance improving customer care, increasing the number of medical staff, reward and compensation, materials and dispensation and provision of drugs on time. Planning regular training for staff members may be also helpful.