PROVISION for more space, staff enhancement and availability of essential medical supplies and services are the three key important health indicators and priority areas to be prioritized for the National Referral Hospital (NRH) in 2025.
NRH Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dr. George Wilson Malefoasi highlighted this when presenting the NRH Annual Operation Plan (AOP) 2024 -2025 at the Ministry of Health and Medical Services (MHMS) National Annual Planning and Budgeting 2024 – 2025 Workshop on Friday at the Heritage Park Hotel.
“We have targeted three main objectives and issues that we always try to meet, the first one is bedding and spacing demand, second is staffing enhancement and lastly supply and services demand.
“We ensure that space is available for every different kinds of diseases.”
He added, they have a range of 341 – 369 beds that are available.
“Last year we have an average of 322 beds occupied per day, so that’s roughly about 90% occupation.”
He said, Non-Communicable –Disease (NCD) departments are in high demand for bed spacing, while subspecialist diseases such as kidney, cardiac, urology, tuberculosis (TB) beds are fully occupied.
“Now if you look at different departments, like Operation and Genealogy their bedding’s has gone beyond 100%.
“We ensure we expand bed space within the current infrastructure and we also like to renovate and repair these wards for next year.”
Another focus for next year is ensuring they have separate beds and spaces for diabetes, cardiac, renal, urinary diseases, Oncology, Palliative care and maternal wards, the CEO stressed.
He said staffing enhancement at the national hospital is one of the key priority areas to consider and improve on come 2025.
Currently NRH has employed 1019 staff and there is also a need for subspecialist knowledge and upskilling trainings provided and staff productivity such as staff needs to build on for the next ten years.
“Staffing is one of our key objectives in terms of ensuring staff are on the ground, staff who are trained, staff that comes on time and always come to work.
“So those are some of our objectives to see if we could ensure we see that staff are available on ground and on time.”
They are also working on a training plan, and they have done some negotiations with four universities in India and strengthen their memorandum of understanding (MOUs) with the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG), Fiji National University (FNU) and People’s Republic of China (PRC), he said.
He added, hope the Hospital birthing center at Naha is up and going so that it will alleviate some of the burden at the hospital.
“So our plan activities in our AOP are really around space, infrastructure, staffing, and supplies and that will be our priorities for next year,” Malefoasi highlighted.
The NRH CEO highlighted that infrastructure plans ahead, staffing enhancement, good clinical governance action plans, audits, human resource reviews, number of staff to be employed and their allocations and finally subspecialist with training opportunities with the MOUs strengthen with the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG), Fiji National University (FNU) including the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Indian Government are planned key actions or activities that will be linked to address these key priorities areas.
The CEO also added that they would like to see some sort of a new hospital information system to manage patient management pharmacy records/data and they want stock supplies to be safe and secure at all times.
By RAYMOND HULANGA
Solomon Star, Honiara
