July 15, 2022 | Anthony Okoth
Dr. Kristen Stafford, Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) and Deputy Director of Ciheb Global, visited the Nairobi Centers of Excellence on a week-long tour in May 2022. She visited the Kenyatta National Hospital, Pumwani Maternity Hospital, and Mathari National Teaching and Referral Hospital. During this trip, she met with the hospital administration and clinic staff to discuss the Centers of Excellence’s vision and opportunities.
A Center for Excellence is a team, shared facility, or entity that provides high standards of quality of care, research, leadership, services, education, and brings innovative mechanisms to promote knowledge and scientific advancements. Achievement of epidemic control provides an opportunity for Centers of Excellence that have patient- and context-specific integrated services to expand their impact further. These will in turn enable Centers of Excellence to play a critical role in providing high quality of care to different populations with specific needs, such as older people living with HIV or cancer patients living with HIV, as well as serving as both referral and training sites.
Centers of Excellence offer the standard package of care for people living with HIV, as well as specialized care. The Centers of Excellence Ciheb-Kenya and UMB are working in different areas of care, namely:
- Pumwani – delivering quality maternity care
- Mathari – offering medically assisted therapy for opioid use disorder
- KNH – specializing in advanced HIV disease
To support the Centers of Excellence, Dr. Stafford met with senior management at each hospital with Ciheb-Kenya and UMB Kenya staff, where they shared feedback on various hospital processes, including patient flow. Dr. Stafford, hospital management, and staff also identified new metrics to evaluate Centers of Excellence impact, discussed opportunities and plans to use data from the Centers of Excellence as “sentinel surveillance” to identify “leaks” in the HIV care and treatment continuum, and identified benchmarks to monitor the progress towards sustainable transition. Moving forward, the new metrics, data use, and benchmarks are expected to measure the impact of the Centers of Excellence. A new Center of Excellence, expected to open at the Kenyatta University Teaching Hospital, will specialize in cancer care and treatment.
Contact
Center for International Health, Education, and Biosecurity
Institute of Human Virology
Anthony Okoth
Regional Communications Specialist
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