Engendering Quality :

Assuring Quality

Fistula Care worked to assure quality and safe provision of services by providing support to facilities to develop and implement guidelines, protocols, and standards for care and for training of facility staff, program staff, and community health workers.

Guidelines, protocols, and training curricula can help to define the clinical standards for fistula treatment. These tools can help health care workers and facilities offer high-quality care to women suffering from fistula. Standardized tools, such as monitoring indicators, can help managers monitor and track trends in the services provided. The facility assessment guidelines are designed to determine the readiness of a hospital to offer fistula repair services.

Confidential investigations into all serious complications, including any deaths, can allow facilities to identify causative and contributory factors and establish systems to minimize similar occurrences in the future.

Sustained and increased access to fistula treatment services depends on training surgical teams to take on the task. It is therefore important to ensure that training is of high quality, with the requisite supervision and follow-up in the context of the program as a whole. Fistula Care’s training strategy informs a uniform approach to improve the quality of training and subsequent service delivery.

This section includes curricula and training modules to promote quality services for different cadres, including community health workers, nurses and midwives, and surgeons, journal articles, and tools for assessing and monitoring fistula services.

View the Resources and Tools.

This resource was made possible by the generous support of the American people through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), under the terms of the cooperative agreement GHS-A-00-07-00021-00. The information provided on this resource is not official U.S. Government information and does not represent the views or positions of the USAID or the U.S. Government.