By Noimot Olayiwola/Staff Reporter


Haila Salem: stresses on upgrading expertise
The expertise of nurses at the Women’s Hospital is being strengthened through a special strategic plan with a view to keeping pace with the new trends in the nursing profession, an official said.
Management, education, customer services, resources utilisation and quality are the thrust areas of the plan, which is expected to help them compete with counterparts from elsewhere in the world.
“Our aim is to ensure that all our nurses are experts in all aspects of nursing,” the hospital’s nursing assistant executive director Haila Salem said.
A good number of the nursing staff, especially Qataris, have received internal education on how to improve their career while a group of four nurses are being sent to Bahrain for a course on midwifery.
“Our educational programme is aimed at all staff regardless of qualifications and nationalities, but we are paying special attention to our Qatari staff because they are being envisaged as future leaders of the hospital,” Salem said adding another group of Qatari nurses would soon graduate from the University of Calgary in Qatar (UCQ).
“As this group is ending their programme at UCQ by next year, another batch is just starting a career in nursing at the institution,” she said.
Under the resource utilisation plan, the official explained that services at the hospital were being decentralised by ensuring that each nurse was fully responsible for her unit, and controls the budgets and expenses of that unit.
“To ensure that all our nurses have expertise in all areas we will, in the coming month, start a programme of cross-training whereby staff will be made to work in each unit and in different departments within the hospital in order to gain an all-round hands-on skills. For instance, those working in the Emergency unit may be asked to work in the labour room just to learn the process of delivery...of course these nurses are midwives but I believe they need constant training to keep them abreast of trends in the profession,” Salem said.
In terms of quality, she explained that the administration will soon begin to document any inadvertent error caused by a nurse in order to put corrective measures and ensure no repeat of such incidents.
“We are working on putting together indicators that will help us pinpoint and at the same time improve our weaknesses and problem areas.”
Salem said that the hospital was working on a proposal aimed at improving its homecare services.
“We want to be able to do follow-up on mothers who had their babies through a “straight-forward normal delivery” at around six weeks after delivery. Our nursing team will visit the patients in their homes to check and assess both the mother and the baby and in case of any medical concern, they will book them for appointment for prompt diagnosis and treatment,” she said.
Salem added that the new plan will help reduce the length of hospital stay by new mothers considerably with the present stay ranging from 12-16 hours.
“We are hoping that this programme will help in ensuring bed availability as mothers and their newborns who have been confirmed fit can leave the hospital to allow room for the newcomers and those who desperately need the bed space,” she said.
There are nearly 1,000 nurses presently working at the Women’s Hospital and plans are on cards to recruit more, Salem said.