Medical News

DEPARTMENTAL OVERVIEW/INTRODUCTION

Family Medicine is a specialty that provides continuous, coordinated, and comprehensive health care to undifferentiated patients in a holistic manner regardless of the age, sex, disease conditions and tribe. The holistic approach to care makes every patient to be seen in his totality and in the context of his family, culture and community. It is a discipline which integrates several medical specialties into a new whole. Family Physicians are specialists trained to coordinate and integrate all the necessary health care services with skills to manage most medical problems thus providing efficient and cost-effective health care. Family physicians treat both the patients that have the disease and the disease. Disease prevention and early recognition of disease are essential features of the discipline.

The Department is a gate keeper for all the other specialists in authorizing access to specialty care in terms of patients sorting, selection, referral as well as integration to care. As a gate keeper, our role starts from patients’ recognition of where the gate is, getting access to the gate with ease and making sure that the gate can accommodate all without any delay. Our gatekeeping therefore has crucial influences on service utilization, health outcomes, healthcare costs and patient satisfaction. Our activities therefore are embedded in our roles as Family doctors who attend to the needs of their family members, ensuring that they are comfortable, have opportunity to express their feelings without any prejudice or bias and making sure that they have better quality of life.

The Department of Family Medicine came into existence in 2008. The mission of the Department of Family Medicine is in three fold:

To promote academic excellence in the training of both undergraduate medical students and residents in the specialty of Family Medicine. To provide compassionate, competent and efficient front line care to the public. To carry out research that will benefit humanity and solve common medical and surgical problems.

 It comprises the following service units: General Outpatient Clinic, Accident and Emergency, NHIS/Staff Clinic, Anti-retroviral clinic, Family Medicine ward and Family Medicine Outreach Station.

DEPARTMENTAL ACTIVITIES The activities of the department of Family Medicine are numerous, and it includes both clinical and academic programmes which are run with the under listed staff strength.

CLINICAL ACTIVITIES/SERVICES RENDERED IN THE DEPARTMENT

• The GOP clinic runs every day of the week (Mondays to Sundays) and patients are seen as they present.
• Patients for observations and/or admissions are attended to in the Family Medicine ward.
• Referral to the specialist clinics is done on daily basis as the needs arise.
• Clients and members of staff registered under NHIS are seen in NHIS clinic on daily basis.
• People living with HIV/AIDS are attended to every Tuesday at the Adult Retroviral Therapy (also known as Care & Support) Clinic.
• Health Education is given to patients every morning by the Nurses/Doctors and/or community health extension workers before being attended to by the doctors.
• The nurses in the department are responsible for measurement of vital signs, wound dressing and administration of intra-muscular injections. Any patient with abnormally high/unstable vital signs is flagged as priority to be urgently seen by the doctors.
• Information, Education & Counselling (ICE) is given to every patient based on the diagnosis and reason for encounter.
• Family counselling/conference and/or couple’s counselling are done in designated consulting/seminar room as the need arises.
• Clinical Psychologist and Dietician are always on ground to give psychotherapy and nutritional/dietary counsel respectively to patients that need them
• Phlebotomist is on ground most days for ease and comfort of patients who require investigations.
• Rural clinical postings and coverage of the institution’s community health centre out station (Igogo community)
• Coverage of NYSC Clinics.
• Junior Resident Doctors spend three months in the department and then go on postings in other clinical departments of the hospital.
• Senior Residents rotates internally through the above units and also go on tutelage and Senior Surgical postings outside the hospital.