Improving public healthcare in Namibia through clinical governance: A systemic review

The Namibian government through the Ministry of Health and Social Services has been working to improve the health status of its population. Considering the change in disease burden, availability of resources and collaboration between stakeholders, the goal is to make health service upgrades to best serve the population at large. Health service upgrades require systematic joining of strategies to improve the quality of care provided by public healthcare institutions. The introduction of clinical governance will allow for the establishment of necessary structures to implement standards and ensuring that they are met. Key areas addressed by clinical governance are strategic planning, leadership, staff training and education, patient involvement and organizational structure and management. A systemic review was conducted, and articles were retrieved from databases for this review. The articles were published between January 2000 to March 2022 and the Prisma checklist was used to extract and organize the data with inclusion criteria. Duplicate articles were removed, and further analysis of article titles and abstracts was done to remove irrelevant articles. Finally, only articles relating to clinical governance were included in the review. Nine articles directly focused on clinical governance while the remaining seven addressed key areas of clinical governance. The findings were grouped into two main categories 1) barriers to clinical governance 2) strategies for clinical governance implementation. Patient centered care and consumer satisfaction should be the driving force for every healthcare institution and public healthcare systems at large. Necessary measures and active steps need to be taken to ensure the best quality service is provided to individual patients. Healthcare systems managers should develop suited frameworks that can be adapted locally up to facility level.