16 Mar 2015

The Jwaneng Mine hospital was recently awarded the Council for Health Service Accreditation of Southern Africa (COHSASA) accreditation for the fourth time in a row since 2002.

A press release from the mine stated that the hospital was first awarded in 2002 and managed to maintain the high quality service and patient care that consequently saw it being re-accredited every three years since its first accreditation.

The accreditation, the release said, reassured stakeholders that patients receiving care and treatment at Jwaneng Mine Hospital had access to top of the range facilities and quality health services.

Such facilities included systems based on best practice to ensure that the hospital functions according to quality standards, service improvement monitoring systems, clearly defined methods of interacting with patients to ensure their well-being, maximum efficiency, appropriate staff development and training programs and a safe and clean environment for staff, patients and visitors.

In an interview, Jwaneng mine Corporate Affairs Manager, Ms Montlenyane Baaitse noted that for the hospital to be re-awarded for the fourth time in a row showed that it was constantly striving to match international standards in as far as health care services were concerned.

Ms Baaitse said even though the COHSASA was currently the only international health care accreditation body which has awarded Jwaneng mine hospital, goverment, through the Ministry of Health, honoured them with a certificate of achievement for TB case management in 2012.

Furthermore, she said to ensure that they continued to satisfy the COHSASA standards, they had put in place a robust monitoring and evaluation strategy.

“The accreditation is for a period of three years after which the hospital will need to demonstrate through another audit that the standards as defined by COHSASA have been maintained. To ensure this happens, a team of health workers have been trained and tasked with conducting regular audits as a way of monitoring and evaluation, to identify gaps or areas that require special attention,” she explained.

She however noted that as they continued to deliver high quality services to the Jwaneng community and those in the peripheries, the hospital continued to encounter challenges, the biggest of which was managing client expectations.

She said the tendency by patients to bypass health facilities nearer to them led to congestion at the Jwaneng mine hospital which resulted in long waiting times.

The annual budget for the hospital, she said has been increasing annually and currently stood at P64 million. ENDS