Dr. Zainab Yunusa-Kaltungo

University of Sheffield-Bayero University Kano-Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital partnership

Dr. Zainab Yunusa-Kaltungo, is a plastic surgeon, the Chairman of the medical advisory committee (CMAC) and Clinical Governance lead of the project at the Federal Teaching Hospital (FTH), Gombe in north-east Nigeria.

“The partnership, which began in 2015, aims at improving patients’ safety and quality of health care in tertiary hospitals in northern Nigeria. The partnership has trained over 214 health workers from community health workers to theatre technicians.

Four volunteers from the NHS visited to assess need and train local health workers on patient safety. The project initially aimed to train 35 health workers, but the team decided to expand to 70 to efficiently respond to patients’ demand at the hospital. The hospital now has a robust Multidisciplinary Patient Safety Team (MPST), conducting surveys of the patient safety culture in the hospital, and there is hospital wide awareness of what constitutes patient safety and incident reporting.

Though the project has been very successful, we’ve had a few challenges including the raging Boko haram insurgency that severely disrupted the planned sessions of the training because of newly identified terrorist hotspots.

The THET project is the first health partnership I have been a part of and it’s been an exciting journey that has continued even after the project officially closed in February 2017”.