Session 3 confronted one of healthcare's most challenging cultural barriers: transforming blame-based systems into learning environments. Real-time polling of conference participants revealed the unfortunate reality: fear of punishment remains the biggest hurdle to incident reporting across African healthcare systems.
The Quality Evolution
Keynote speaker Ronel R. Steinhobel from South Africa presented a roadmap for systematic change and hope for the future. Her country’s journey began with assessments across nine diverse provinces, leading to their first national patient safety reporting system in 2018. “We started with partnerships and piloted in a subset of facilities to identify gaps,” Steinhobel explained, emphasizing that leadership commitment at all levels was crucial for success.
The Problem at Hand
Panel discussions revealed sobering truths across the continent. Ethiopia’s Prof. Esayas Kebede described incident reporting as “at infancy stage” due to entrenched blame culture, while Nigeria’s Dr. Olanrewaju Olatunji Sulaimon noted that while multiple agencies receive incident reports, “the country is working on a unified system.” Ghana’s Dr. Selina Dussey highlighted their national reporting forms but acknowledged “reporting is not very strong because of blame culture.” Kenya’s Lavender Adhiambo shared their hospital’s shift to anonymous digital reporting, which proved “quite effective” in encouraging staff to come forward.
Breaking Through Cultural Barriers
Kenya’s Dr. Lydia Okutoyi highlighted the gap between policy and practice: “We have the National Policy on Patient Safety launched in 2022, but how do we move from policy to practice?” The consensus emerged around anonymous reporting systems and continuous feedback loops.
The Path Forward
Participant and Dr. Peter Lachman emphasized: “Why are we reporting? It’s for learning, not punishment.” The session concluded with commitment to building psychologically safe and secure reporting environments across the African healthcare system.
Next Up: Session 4 explores training needs analysis to build quality improvement capacity across Africa’s healthcare workforce.