Lien en Lien in Uganda

Implementation of mSupply

St. Francis Hospital Nsambya is a private hospital in Kampala. It was founded in 1903 as a Catholic missionary hospital and has grown ever since; now is has the capacity of 361 beds with 18,000 admissions and 5,500 births annually. The hospital has a broad range of specialities: Paediatrics, Internal Medicine, Gynaecology, Urology, Orthopaedics, Eye care, HIV/AIDS, Emergency Unit and it has a recently built pharmacy.

Ugandan healthcare has to deal with different diseases than healthcare in The Netherlands. Diseases responsible for the largest proportion of morbidity and mortality in Uganda are malaria, acute respiratory infections, HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB), malnutrition, maternal and perinatal conditions, cardiovascular conditions and trauma/accidents. The state provides some free medicine for malaria (Co-artem), HIV/AIDS and TB.

In Kampala there are many different hospitals. Most are private hospitals, once started as missionary hospitals, and there is one big state hospital. As St Francis Hospital is a private, non-profit hospital, patients have to pay for their treatment themselves. Patients can choose to be in private wings, where they will pay more for their treatment, but get their own room and better treatment.

Medicines are supplied from the hospital pharmacy to wards, inpatients and outpatients. Outpatients have to pay for the medicines before they are supplied to them; inpatients normally receive medicines from the wards’ storage, but occasionally receive them from the pharmacy as well.

Customer invoices, either from wards or inpatients, are registered in books. In order to have full registration and to be able to create management overviews a computer program, mSupply, has been implemented in the pharmacy some years ago. This program is developed for use in developing countries, mainly for registration of received and supplied goods. Although the program has been running for a few years, full registration of supplied medicines hardly takes place at the moment. The main reason for this is that only a few members of staff have been trained to use the program. To ensure implementation and continuity of the mSupply project it will be necessary to have more staff trained to use the program and enter data.

Before starting training staff, the stockroom had to be counted again in order to have correct data in the databases. Also Standard Operating Procedures concerning login, e-mailing the mSupply helpdesk and exporting and importing invoices had to be written, which are used during training sessions.