Senior officials of the Ministry of Health led by the Deputy Chief Medical Officer (DCMO) Clinical, Dr. Mustapha Kabba, recently concluded a highly productive visit to the Republic of Rwanda to explore ways of how Sierra Leonean health professionals can benefit from the many learning opportunities in higher institutions of Rwanda. This trip, attended by the project management team (PMT) of MoH, was very timely as it provided the country a chance to closely learn how to improve on organizational planning and implementation capabilities. Inspired by the Minister’s vision to improve patient-centered care by deliberately investing in human capital of the health sector, the visit created hands-on learning scenarios from some of the best practices from Rwanda and also provided a platform for collaborative engagements that aim at improving service delivery in sexual and reproductive health.
Among other strategic meetings, the team held very successful discussions with the Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Global Health Equity (UGHE), Professor Abebe Bekele, to further explore avenues for more Sierra Leoneans to access the high-quality professional training courses offered at the prestigious UGHE in Butaro, Rwanda. It has to be said that UGHE offers some of the best professional and academic courses to healthcare workers targeted at strengthening the African health workforce and improving service delivery. This institution provides scholarships for African students to study Medicine, MSc in Global Surgery, Global Nursing Leadership, and Global Health Delivery, among others.
These top-notch tailor-made courses are meant to respond to current global healthcare needs of people, particularly in Africa. The visit to UGHE also explored opportunities for middle- and senior-level managers of MoH to benefit from these courses, especially leadership courses such as the Executive Leadership certificate and diploma programmes.
In addition, the MoH delegation also had fruitful engagements with the Rwandan Biomedical Centre. This entailed very extensive discussions on how the Community Health Programme is run. The Sierra Leonean team was very interested in exploring ways of implementing some of the best practices of the Rwandan Community Health Workers (CHW) program.
The trip ended with a visit to the Health Intelligence Center (HIC), a component of the Rwandan Government’s digitization project. This is an ultra-modern visualization and data hub where information from across the country’s health interventions and results are displayed, analyzed, and interpreted, as well as actions taken to improve health outcomes.
The dashboards are easy to understand even for non-data-savvy people. With digital health now the backbone of health service delivery and data-driven decision-making, the Sierra Leonean team was actively seeking ways to learn firsthand how the HIC can be replicated back home to help improve on the gains made in maternal and child health.