The Patient Safety Programme at Hamad Medical Corporation has conducted over 400 quality improvement programmes since 2014, an official said.
"Quality improvement programmes aim to increase patient safety and the quality of care for patients at all the facilities," Dr Moza al-Ishaq, executive director, Clinical Transformation Corporate Quality Patient Safety Programme at HMC said.
“The whole concept of quality enhancement has been divided into several sections. They are quality improvement, patient safety, education and training as well as quality improvement research,” said Dr al-Ishaq.
“We run several improvement projects. Some of them run for six months while others for one year. These programmes aim to increase patient safety and the quality of care that we give to the patients,” she said.
“We aim to build a culture of safety. At the ME forum, held recently, we discussed the theme of building a culture of safety. We have to be responsible about the safety of the patients. So we have decided to run a workshop of quality and safety in collaboration with Joint Commission International,” the official said.
“We have started the quality improvement training programme in several groups for all the facilities and entities under HMC. We have had three cohorts last year. In cohort one, we had about 100 participants and in the second one we had we had 11 groups and 95 participants. In the third cohort, we trained about 102 members.”
The official also said the HMC would launch a new training programme next week on the occasion of the patient safety awareness week.
According to Dr al-Ishaq, every patient has the right to ask three questions to the medical team:
"What is my main problem?, why should I do this? and why is it important for me to do this? The medial team also focuses on reducing the harm and improving patient safety. We are planning to engage the patients and the families in the whole process,” she said.
"We are also starting the quality improvement research. Before implementing a quality improvement programme we have to test it. We have adopted a particular plan called PDSA (Plan, Do, Study and Act) to enforce this programme. You have to test before implementing a programme as it should be evidence-based. Every year we are going to have quality improvement studies.”
