ArticleHealth policy and planning2021
Staff recognition and its importance for surgical service delivery: a qualitative study in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Article in Health policy and planning, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 21 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Challenges and enablers in accessing paediatric inguinal hernia surgical care in Sierra Leone: a qualitative exploratory study.BMJ open · 2026Article
- Employed but Unpaid, Volunteers or Paradoxical Surplus? Sierra Leone's Unsalaried Health Workforce.The International journal of health planning and management · 2026Article
- Household costs, catastrophic out-of-pocket payments and impoverishment related to accessing surgical care in rural Ethiopia.PloS one · 2026Article
- Invisible and undervalued: A qualitative study of laboratory workers' experiences and perceptions of laboratory strengthening in Sierra Leone.African journal of laboratory medicine · 2024Article
- Article
- A qualitative study examining the health system's response to COVID-19 in Sierra Leone.PloS one · 2024Article
- Health system assessment for access to care after injury in low- or middle-income countries: A mixed methods study from Northern Malawi.PLoS medicine · 2024Article
- Unsalaried health workers in Sierra Leone: a scoping review of the literature to establish their impact on healthcare delivery.International journal for equity in health · 2023Article
- Access to surgical care in Ethiopia: a cross-sectional retrospective data review.BMC health services research · 2022Article
- Article
- Challenges and solutions to providing surgery in Sierra Leone hospitals: a qualitative analysis of surgical provider perspectives.BMJ open · 2022Article
- Prevalence and factors associated with utilisation of postnatal care in Sierra Leone: a 2019 national survey.BMC public health · 2022Article
- Article
- Chronic wounds in Sierra Leone: Searching for Buruli ulcer, a NTD caused by Mycobacterium ulcerans, at Masanga Hospital.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We examined the views of providers and users of the surgical system in Freetown, Sierra Leone on processes of care, job and service satisfaction and barriers to achieving quality and accessible care, focusing particularly on the main public tertiary hospital in Freetown and two secondary and six primary sites from which patients are referred to it. We conducted interviews with health care providers (N = 66), service users (n = 24) and people with a surgical condition who had chosen not to use the public surgical system (N = 13), plus two focus groups with health providers in primary care (N = 10 and N = 10). The overall purpose of the study was to understand perceptions on processes of and barriers to care from a variety of perspectives, to recommend interventions to improve access and quality of care as part of a larger study. Our research suggests that providers perceive their relationships with patients to be positive, while the majority of patients see the opposite: that many health workers are unapproachable and uncaring, particularly towards poorer patients who are unable or unwilling to pay staff extra in the form of informal payments for their care. Many health care providers note the importance of lack of recognition shown to them by their superiors and the health system in general. We suggest that this lack of recognition underlies poor morale, leading to poor care. Any intervention to improve the system should therefore consider staff-patient relations as a key element in its design and implementation, and ideally be led and supported by frontline healthcare workers.
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