The Health System of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Cameroon (OSEELC) runs Ngaoundere Protestant Hospital (NPH), a 220-bed facility with a broad range of in and outpatient services located in northern Cameroon. From August 21 through September 3, a Global Health Administration Partners team (GHAP) consulted with OSEELC. Lutherans in Medical Mission (LIMM) funded international travel expenses for GHAP consultant, Cindy Wilke, founder and director of GHAP. GHAPs purpose is to partner with international, Lutheran faith-based health facilities in order to create effective administration at those facilities. For this visit, GHAP focused on 4 areas: an OSEELC Board retreat, supply chain operations (materials management), and infrastructure improvement for human resources infrastructure and finance.
OSEELCs Board met on August 27 and 28. The retreat agenda included defining the roles and responsibilities of an administrative board, quality of patient care monitoring, clarifying the organization structure of both OSEELC and NPH, telling the history of OSEELC and NPH, and clarifying the OSEELC by-laws.
Nesa Joseph, also a volunteer GHAP consultant, and Cindy Wilke worked with the OSEELC and NPH management teams to assess and develop recommendations to boost the financial future of the hospital. The work focused on format for budget analysis, refining the organization structure, reviewing legal documents, improving the service statistics, investigating salary payment delays, formulating a revenue improvement action plan, continuing human resources projects to upgrade the personnel records and payment systems, a high-level assessment of IT functionality, and advising about how to best manage a major construction project at NPH.
Through its consulting work, GHAP is helping mission hospital administrators to build staff knowledge, systems and processes to sustain the hospitals infrastructure and thereby sustain the delivery of quality care for the population served.
LIMM was excited to respond to the request for funding of Cindys trip to Cameroon. Good administrative practices are almost always overlooked as a major key into running a good mission health care facility that is sustainable. In the past LIMM has partnered with Global Health Ministries, GHAPs parent organization, and we felt strongly that this is an area of medical missions (health administration) that requires significant support, stated Bobbie Lautenschlager, LIMMs CEO.
