CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1    BACKGROUND OF STUDY
General Hospital calabar. The hospital provide qualitative Health care services but maintains that they do not just heal mere physical illness which attacks the human body, but a much deeper and holistic healing of the entire human person.
These service areas include all the wards (medical and surgical for male and female, pediatrics, chest unit and the maternity section as a whole. Other departments are out patient department (OPD), laboratory department, pharmacy department, central sterling and supply department (C.S.S.D), X-RAY department community medicine and the mobile clinic, and theatre department. The roles of these departments are complementary and depict what they call team-work in patient management, the patient always beings at the center.
The Hospital since its establishment has demonstrated a very keen interest in the staff recruitment and development of highly skilled and very dependable medical and paramedical personnel. Presently, their work force stands at 460.
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEMS
Many problems are encountered with the manual method of handling files. It is quite unfortunate that ESUT Teaching Hospital. In spite of her large medical service and recognition still keep her records manually.
The problems associated with this manual system include time wastage, ineffective use of statistical data, and duplication of efforts in records keeping. Delay in decision making, it requires a lot of clerical efforts inability to cope up with daily work load. Slow in responding the queries / enquires, Rodents records, lot of human mistakes, lack of confidentiality of files and high cost of stationary.
This project is aimed at devising a system that will eradicate these above problems and improve medical services to the citizens. This computerization process is believed to be capable of not only solving these problems but many more to be encountered.
1.3    AIM/OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT
The main purpose of this project is to investigate and design a computer based medical services, capable of eradicating the above mentioned problems to be speeding up the processing, storing and retrieval of information which greatly assist medical personnel in the performance of their duties. Again, it will provide a means to ease medical laboratory statistics and improve decision making by reducing processing time, as well as reducing the communication gap between the Doctors and other staff still involved in the patient medical care. It will also reduce human errors to the barest minimum and improve the confidentiality of files. In summary, the objective is to set an efficient medical database for the advancement of the medical research and analysis.
1.4    JUSTIFICATION FOR THE PROJECT
The researcher during the course of this investigation found out that all the medical keeping record are done manually and having seen the problem associated with the manual system, the researcher calls for a new system in patient related services. The new system is justified in many ways.
The design of the new system will eliminate the problems of the system mentioned earlier by providing quick file retrieval and searches. By providing accurate up to date information on demand.
It will minimize redundantly , loss of information will be prevented, the need for volume paper files and unnecessary spending of paper folders, file cabinet will be removed and adequate security will be provided to ensure database system.
Furthermore, the new system is justified when receptionist, medical record clerks in recording would not be our worked again by the implemented of the automatic system.