Success Story

User Services Offices Reshape the Face of Public Hospitals

Photo by: María Fidelia de Moya

The user services offices help the hospitals provide better services to their patients.  

Patients walking in to the Dr. Alejo Martinez Hospital in Ramón Santana will be greeted by a sunny waiting room and friendly staff. They will ask for their file, by number, name or ID, and be provided with it in a few minutes. They will wait for the doctor while watching a video about their rights as patients.

These are some of the many improvements you can see in the public hospital since it opened its User Services Office (USO), thanks to USAID Dominican Republic (USAID/DR) technical and financial assistance. The Dr. Alejo Martinez Hospital is one of the beneficiaries of USAID/DR’s Health Sector Reform Project (Redsalud, in Spanish), which supports the strengthening and advancement of the new Dominican Health Care System. Working with Redsalud, 14 hospitals in the Dominican Republic’s eastern region have opened USOs and implemented the changes that come with it, including a new filing system; electronic record keeping; remodeling their waiting room; training their staff; better and faster attention to patients; and putting up suggestion boxes.

The Redsalud project works with the Ministry of Health and Hospital Administration and staff to improve the quality of health care in the five provinces in the eastern region. By helping the hospitals in this region create their USOs, USAID helps hospitals provide better services with more efficient staff and processes.

Dr. Lorenza Jáquez, the director of the Dr. Alejo Martínez hospital, has led this process in Ramón Santana. She explains that Redsalud first trained the staff in customer services and using the computers. Then, they worked on putting signs up in the hospital so the patients could find their way around easily.

Jacienta Morla, a local resident who says she has visited the hospital all her life, is very happy with the treatment she receives and with the way the hospital looks. “It is always clean,” she says “the hospital has changed for the good. Now it’s wonderful.”

USAID/DR also assists these hospitals in reorganizing their filling system. In the Francisco Gonzalvo Hospital in La Romana, the region’s largest city, this meant sorting through thousands of files and eliminating duplications of numbers and names. “We would find one person with three case numbers assigned, and three people with the same case number,” explains Dr. Ana Gomez, Francisco Gonzalvo Hospital’s deputy director. After the review, the number of files dropped from 93,000 to 27,000. An efficient filing system also means that doctors will have the information they need to provide quicker and better diagnosis and treatment to their patients.

Both staff and patients notice the improvements. “People feel that we treat them better now” says Dr. Leonardo Félix, director of the Francisco Antonio Gonzalvo Hospital, “now they know where to find the information they need.”

The hospitals in this region are still undergoing changes under the Redsalud project: improving their record keeping, training their staff and fixing their infrastructure. But meanwhile, they are able to keep treating patients with a better customer service approach and serving as models for hospitals throughout the country.