by Dr. Perry Jansen
A true Teaching Hospital has medical education as a core component of its mission and culture. Quality medical education requires a hospital that operates smoothly and models best practices in clinical care. African Mission Healthcare recognizes these interdependencies and strategically invests to catalyze the growth of a mission hospital into a teaching hospital.
The pillars of a quality teaching hospital are:
- Organizational Excellence
- Clinical Excellence and
- A Culture of Learning and Teaching
In this primer, we’ll examine each of these pillars so you can see the importance of each one.
Organizational Excellence
Mission hospitals have historically focused on providing quality, compassionate care to the neediest communities. Western-trained missionary physicians and nurses provided leadership for clinical care, and many of the hospitals were owned and overseen by mission agencies. The growth of national churches and church leaders has often also been accompanied by a slowing number of healthcare missionaries and decreased funding from Western churches. Hospitals that have thrived through this transition have also developed solid local governance and national leadership, mature systems (finance, human resources, and clinical services), and quality infrastructure (buildings, equipment, utilities, etc.).
African Mission Healthcare’s investments in strengthening Organizational Excellence are as unique as the needs of our hospital partners. From board governance training and leadership development to management advisory services for finance and human resources, we recognize the importance of organizational health. Our most significant investments have been in infrastructure, especially housing, medical education space, and utilities (solar, oxygen, water, and septic systems).
Clinical Excellence
Building upon the legacy of healthcare missionaries, African mission hospitals offer higher quality care than public sector and private, for-profit hospitals and consistently recognize the need for spiritual care for patients, families, and communities. Whether surgical, family medicine, or nursing, the presence of a training program raises the quality of clinical services through modeling clinical best practices and integrating quality improvement into training. A mission hospital with programs for Surgery, Anesthesia, Family Medicine, and Nursing builds a quality, complimentary team and meets the needs of its community.
African Mission Healthcare partners with the Pan-African Academy of Christian Surgeons (PAACS) to launch and support surgical training programs. We invest in training anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists to support surgery at PAACS programs. We support the infrastructure, faculty, and programs for family medicine training programs. African Mission Healthcare also invests in strengthening laboratory services, building, equipping, and staff training for operating theaters and intensive care units (ICUs).
African Mission Healthcare’s SAFE Surgery program provides financial and technical resources to fund life-saving surgery for the many patients who cannot afford care. It includes an active program to measure outcomes, quality of care, and patient experience. In many PAACS sites, this funding mechanism plays a vital role in generating the surgical volume and variety necessary to train an impactful surgeon who goes on to train the next generation of surgeons.
A Culture of Learning and Teaching
While many mission hospitals train healthcare workers, a Teaching Hospital is one where each hospital and clinical leader sees themselves as learners and teachers. Its culture begins at the highest level of governance and leadership, includes medical education as a core part of its mission, and prioritizes learning and teaching in its daily activities. This includes deliberate efforts to incorporate continuous quality improvement. Its daily training activities include medical and surgical best practices as well as discipleship, Biblical training, and community outreach.
The Power of a Network
The most lasting impact of the Mission Hospital Teaching Network initiative will be the impact of networking our partners with one another. Our newer training hospitals benefit from the lessons our “mentor” hospitals have learned from decades of training programs. These hospitals train specialists to return to their home countries to serve their communities and train the next generation of healthcare workers and leaders. African Mission Healthcare has developed tools for our Mission Hospital Teaching Network partners to share the resources that they have developed over the years with one another and make each hospital better.