Systems Improvement Support to John F. Kennedy Medical Center

Jhpiego Country Director (Dr Birhanu) handing over laptop to the JFKMC Medical Records Director (Mrs Attoh). Photo credit: JFKMC

Real-time use of HMIS ledger at the Memorial hospital Outpatient Department. Photo credit: HSDF

Appropriately arranged injectables section of the pharmacy warehouse (following Accelerator’s ongoing intervention)

Liberia's John F. Kennedy Medical Centre (JFKMC) Trauma Center

The Challenge

As Liberia continues to recover from the effects of two civil wars and the effect of the Ebola crisis, USAID has supported the Government of Liberia’s commitment to building a more resilient and effective health system including the John F. Kennedy Medical Center (JFKMC) – a significant and vital part of Liberia’s health system. JFKMC is Liberia’s largest tertiary hospital and serves a population of over three million, including a large proportion of clients who are unable to afford the fees for services rendered. Determined to drive sustainable health system changes, the management of the hospital requested support from USAID to address challenges in the facility’s financial, service delivery, and supply chain management systems. Weaknesses in the hospital’s systems across these three strategic domains pose significant risks to the hospital and the health of the people of Liberia.

The Opportunity

To support the JFKMC on this journey of overcoming its systemic challenges, the Accelerator is partnering with the management of the country’s foremost medical center to improve its processes and systems across fiscal, service delivery and supply chain for effectiveness and sustainability.

The Accelerator and the JFKMC senior leadership team, with support of USAID/Liberia, are co-creating remedial actions to address root causes of identified weaknesses that were surfaced during a diagnostic of the facility. Interventions have been stratified into short-term, medium-term, and long-term activities, based on the interventions’ cost and timeline for implementation. The Accelerator is also working to strength the implementation team’s capacity for change management through coaching and advising.

Our Work

The Accelerator is leveraging international and regional health systems strengthening experts to “coach” an implementation team at the facility and advise the senior management team of JFKMC. This work focuses on how the implementation and senior management teams can adapt and leverage regional and global evidence to enhance their hospital system management capacity. Using the Institutional Architecture (IA) framework, the Accelerator works to build the capacities of JFKMC’s actors to improve processes and mobilize/maximize local resources.

The Accelerator’s support cuts across:

Improving governance and management capacity and processes. This work involves engaging with the senior leadership of the JFKMC to ensure leadership has the appropriate tools and technical capacity to effectively and efficiently manage the financial management, service delivery and logistics management systems in the hospital, as well as lead own change strategies. This also involves ensuring availability, utilization and compliance to key policies and guidelines across all units/functional areas across the institution.
Driving functional and sustainable systems improvement at the JFKMC contributing significantly towards the overall health systems improvement in Liberia. This work involves enabling JFKMC management and implementation teams to make data-driven decisions, primarily through increased visibility into the hospital’s records (including but not limited to financial records, drugs and supplies, and patient data/trends). This is being achieved through the institutionalization of key structures that facilitate availability of reliable data across functional areas of the institution including: a data quality system, data management system, streamlined revenue management system, financial audit programs, and logistics management information system.
Increasing multisectoral collaborations and cross-learning. This work involves the facilitation of increased engagement with stakeholders from the MOH, other implementing partners, the broader health sector and other relevant agencies and ministries. These engagements provide the medical center with platforms for mutually beneficial multisectoral collaborations including cross-learning, and increased resources mobilization.

Through these activities, the Accelerator supports Liberia’s foremost tertiary and referral hospital on its journey to advancing Liberia’s health system architecture.