SURG-Africa’s final report impressed the Tanzanian MoH Advisory Board

On the 24th of May, during the fifth and last meeting with the Advisory Board in Tanzania, SURG-Africa presented the achievements and lessons learnt from the implementation of the project, after four years working closely with local clinicians, professional associations and other stakeholders to bring quality, safe surgery closer to rural communities.

Among some of these achievements, SURG-Africa reported:

• Introduction of the WHO surgical safety checklist at district hospital operating theatres in order to reduce the risk of adverse events and complications, ensuring safer services are provided to patients.
• Improvement of communication between district hospital surgical staff and specialists at regional and central hospitals, for more responsive and better coordinated services across care levels.
• Improvement of surgical skills and confidence at district hospitals shown by the increased number of surgical team members who can perform essential surgical procedures compared to the situation in the past when only few surgical care providers were able to do so. This has improved the availability of surgical services for local communities, so that patients can access the care they need when they need it, close to their homes.
• Increase in the number of facilities that have confidence in providing anaesthesia to paediatric patients when, before all paediatric procedures were referred.    

After the meeting, the Advisory Board members visited Meru and Huruma district hospitals to witness the project achievements first-hand from the beneficiaries. They found it remarkable that Huruma hospital had already begun to use their surgical care providers who benefited from the project, to train other surgical care providers at nearby health centres. This facility allocated funds to facilitate the training.

The Advisory Board showed their willingness to support SURG-Africa in advocating for the uptake of the project outputs and scale up of the supervision model throughout the country.

SURG-Africa Advisory Board members include representatives from the Ministry of Health Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children (MOHCDGEC): Dr. Caroline Damian, Non-communicable diseases and NSOAP coordinator, and Tumainieli Macha, Monitoring and Evaluation director; and the President's Office Regional Administration and Local Governments (PORALG): Dr. James Tumaini Kengia, coordinator for regional health management teams, health system strengthening resource centre, emergency medical services and research & publication.

In Tanzania, two ministries are responsible for health matters: the MOHCDGEC, a policy maker, manages referral, zonal and national hospitals, and PORALG that manages primary health facilities (dispensaries, health centres and district hospitals).