The Hamad Medical Corporation held its first annual Quality Day yesterday with the theme, 'We Can Change'. The Quality Management Department at HMC has, over the last few years, initiated and completed many projects and charted out the needed changes for the future.
"HMC has demonstrated its ability to change and improve and its desire to continuously raise the bar with regard to the quality and safety of patient care falls in line with this celebration," said Dr Hanan Al Kuwari, Manging Director, HMC. "The achievement of JCI accreditation for all five HMC hospitals in 2006 was in itself a unique achievement as there is, no single health system in the world is known to have decided to simultaneously accredit five separate hospitals and successfully do so in such a short period of time. This is evidence of how qualified, competent committed to quality HMC staff are," she said launching the new annual event.
"Hospitals are complex and yet beautiful organizations because they are made up of many different pieces that come together in a specific manner, to deliver something wonderful as life and health. Quality is what ensures that these different pieces are synchronised- it is the invisible glue. Quality is pride in yourself as an individual, pride in yourself as a professional, pride in the care that you are delivering, pride in your team, pride in your hospital and pride in Qatar. So, quality is mostly for our patients, but it also for us for the pride and beauty of our work," she said.
The Quality Management Department aims to explore the patients' needs and expectations and then focus its efforts on meeting those needs. The department has been conducting feasibility and other studies to determine best practices available to meet the needs of the public.
Some of the issues which have been hotly debated in the media, like long-waiting time in various departments, medication errors, backlog of patients and services and some new services, like the breast-feeding initiative, homecare service and community reintegration programmes, have been studied by different teams to ensure quality.
The department has been able to bring down the number of medication errors at various hospitals under HMC. In the first quarter of 2008, 1,167 medication errors were noticed. The quality assurance team was able to bring them down to 472 by the last quarter. In Womens' Hospital, 1,028 errors were notice last year.
The department looked into various stages where errors could happen -- prescribing, transcribing, and illegibility of orders, dispensing, monitoring and administration. Prescribing errors were the leading cause of medication errors, with it being the cause of 63 percent of errors at Al Amal Hospital. In Hamad, a total of 1,438 prescription errors happened last year. Proper monitoring helped to reduce prescription errors at HGH from 613 in the first quarter to 409 in the second, 220 in the third and further in the last quarter.
Another major issue at the HMC is the backlogging of patients for MRI scaning. The benchmark set for MRI waiting time is 60 days in the Gulf region. Through 2007, MRI waiting time was fairly maintained within the set benchmark. However, a sudden spike was noticed in the last quarter of the year with the waiting time increasing to more than 100 days. In the first quarter of 2008, the waiting time was reduced to 80 to 85 days but it went up to 120 days in the third quarter of 2008.
The quality team included extra sessions in the first quarter of 2009 where five afternoon sessions and a Saturday session were included. The waiting time could still be reduced to 75 days. However, in March this year, all the week days were utilised, which included two sessions on Friday, which resulted in the waiting time coming down to 45 days, well within the benchmark.
"The department tries to do the right things in the right way. We align things in a systematic way and execute it as per the need. This in long run will take HMC to higher heights in providing healthcare service," said Dr Badriya Suliman Al Ali, Executive Director, Quality management, HMC
© The Peninsula 2009
