HMB Staff Make Case For Appointment Of Director

Staff of the Health Information Management Department of the Rivers State Hospitals Management Board, have appealed to the Board, to ensure that licensed medical records practitioners are appointed always as directors of the Department of Planning, Research and Statistics (DPRS) in the board.
The staff who are in charge of Planning Research and Statistics who made the appeal during a courtesy visit to the Chief Medical Director of the Board, Dr (Mrs) Dorathy Okoh in Port Harcourt, recently, noted that the consistent appointment of a trained and licensed medical records practitioner as the director of DPRS would be in line with what happens in other directorates in the board such as pharmacy, diagnostic, administration/personnel department among others.
In their address presented by Gaius Ada, the workers also recommended a monthly or quarterly monitoring and evaluation meeting for medical records practitioners to brainstorm on ways to improve data collection, analysis, reporting and interpretation.
The staff stressed the need for the Hospitals Management Board to provide modern infrastructure and medical record equipment, like computer, patient master name, index cabinet, coding and indexing tools, among others in the various hospitals in the state, saying that the ones in use are obsolete .
They appealed to the Chief Medical Director to let the DPRS be in charge of the stationery store, expressing surprise that the stationery store, which was previously managed by the department was transferred to the pharmacy department, which they said had no significant relationship with form design, printing technology, preservation and conservation of records, sales and distribution of medical records stationery.
The workers noted that the mainstay and sustainability of any health care system in the world depended largely on the efficient use of health information management resources for policies, research and forecasting.
Responding, the Chief Medical Director of the Rivers State Hospitals Management Board, Dr (Mrs) Dorothy Okoh, thanked the staff of the DPRS for making the recommendations and promised that the Board would consider them accordingly.
Dr  Okoh, who described the staff of DPRS as professionals, also stressed the need for co-operation among the various departments and staff of the Hospitals Management Board.
Also speaking the Director of Administration, Allwell Imbu, who is also the secretary to the Board, stressed the need for experienced professionals to handle various responsibilities and thanked the staff of the DPRS for making their observations appropriately.