Restoring confidence in the Nigerian healthcare delivery system: essentials of effective health records services

Abstract

Background/Objectives: Nigerian healthcare delivery system has faced a lot of challenges ranging from underfunding, inadequate health workforce, poor service delivery, ineffective health information system, poor access to essential medicines to poor leadership and management. The ineffective health information system in Nigeria might not be unconnected with the disjointed health records management systems in our health facilities. This factors no doubt, are responsible for inaccessibility of patients health records on point-of-care leading to longer patient waiting time and sometimes cause preventable deaths. Loss of patients’/public’s confidence in the Nigerian healthcare delivery system can better be imagined among other clinical challenges in the systems. Restoring patients’ confidence through the instrumentality of effective health records service may be the stepping stone and the right step in the right direction. This paper examined restoring confidence in the Nigerian healthcare delivery system and the essentials of effective health records services. Methods/Design: This paper reviewed various opinions of the scholars as it affect the Nigerian healthcare delivery system, essentials of effective health records services and how to restore the confidence in the system. Results: It was discovered that Nigerian healthcare delivery system is not properly organized and coordinated; it lacks efficiency and effective services thereby causing loss of confidence. Restoring the confidence in the sector is the responsibility of everybody and effective health records service can be accomplished when various healthcare providers who are the contributors to health records accord it with the required high priority and place it in the rightful position of importance it really occupied in the sector. Conclusion: The paper concluded that everything being equal, it is essential to have an effective health records services institutionalized in our healthcare facilities as one of the key drivers of quality healthcare services to restore the confidence in Nigerian healthcare delivery system. The paper however recommended among other things, that health records department should be well structured and staffed in order to provide effective health records services and that deployment of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) should be considered to solve the problems of storage space, misfiling, mislaying and missing case notes so as to restore the confidence of the patients in the system.