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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Martha Ndhlovu, Mrs, Medical Injection Safety Project, JHPIEGO-ZAMBIA, P O Box 36873, Lusaka, Zambia, 260-01-256255, mndhlovu.misp@jhpiego.net

Improving the level of infection prevention and injection safety, the manadate of the Medical Injection Safety program in Zambia to reduce HIV and other transmissible infections, relies on changing multiple behaviours and decisions at service delivery sites. Achieving this takes active support and leadership from management. Successful programs are dependent on managers' understanding the scope of the problem, prioritizing of activities and effective allocation of available resources. In institutions where there is a presence of strong active leadership, they embrace and own programs ensuring: - Adequate facilities, supplies, equipment and logistics support - Staff memebers are adequately trained, motivated and supervised - Guidelines are accessible to staff and being followed. The MISP team has so far oriented more than 200 managers and supervisors in the nine provinces of Zambia and has scored some success in other districts and failure in others. managers in certain districts took up leadership, resulting in improvement in services, while others did not. In this presentation we will outline several successful cases, and describe the motivation of these leaders as well as the types of activities carried out by managers who have displayed strong leadership and incorporated issues of IP/IS into their action plans and budgets. We will also share cases illustrating why some districts and leaders have not done so well despite their managers being oriented. Finally we will discuss some of the interventions the project team has undertaken to address the situation and foster active leadership among health care managers.

Learning Objectives: By the end of this session, participants will be able to

• Describe specific cases in which management leadership resulted in positive changes in medical practices
• Discuss differences between cases in which managers were instrumentalin fostering change, and those in which they were not and
• Illustrate approaches used by the MISP program to engage management in playing a leadership role

Keywords: Accountability,

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered

Handout (.ppt format, 10121.5 kb)