The World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) has concluded the second edition of the Academy for Emerging Leaders in Patient Safety (AELPS). The event, hosted in collaboration with Qatars Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) and the U.S.-based MedStar Health, took place from October 3-7 at Education City in Doha.

The objective of this specialist training is to encourage effective and transparent communication between caregivers, patients, and patients’ families in order to reduce patient harm while under medical care. The program is designed to teach participants through discussing case studies and taking part in various practical demonstrations.

More than 250 healthcare students and practitioners have benefited from the two training sessions that WISH has hosted so far, the first of which was held across five days in March 2016.

Maha El Akoum, Research and Policy Development Officer at WISH, said: “There exists a strong evidence base surrounding the effectiveness of inter-professional collaboration in improving co-ordination, communication, and, as a result, patient safety, quality of care, and patient outcomes. For the second year in Doha, the AELPS has trained a future generation of patient safety leaders from different backgrounds with the aim of bridging the gap between research and practice.” Huda Amer Al-Katheeri, Acting Director of Healthcare Quality & Patient Safety Department at the MoPH, said: “The Ministry of Public Health is proud to co-sponsor the Academy of Emerging Leaders in Patient Safety 2017. I am very confident that everyone attending this training can be a change agent toward the improvement of quality and safety of patients. I believe that we must all work together to achieve this goal, and I am hopeful that each participant will leave this training with lessons they can pass on to others and contribute towards avoiding patient harm, thereby enhancing the healthcare system in Qatar.” Participants included Qatar-based faculty and health science students from Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar; University of Calgary in Qatar; College of North Atlantic, Qatar; and Qatar University; as well as members of staff from the MoPH, experts from Hamad Medical Corporation, and Sidra Medical and Research Center (Sidra).

The first phase of the five-day program was targeted towards faculty, and addressed how to effectively teach students best practices on patient safety, as well as encourage their students to pursue open and honest communication with their patients and each other, in order to reduce medical error.

The second phase, tailored for students, aimed to equip participants with specific strategies that can be used to reduce harm to patients through a range of interactive and hands-on exercises. They heard from MedStar Health patient-safety advocates, who shared lessons with contemporaries from other disciplines, to encourage future collaboration.

Participant, Ilham Hashi, formerly a nurse and currently a case manager at Sidra, said: “This training has created awareness of the safety risks in healthcare and why they occur. It has provided us with tools to create a culture of safety by being mindful, taking action to remedy medical mishaps, communicate with transparency, and incorporate safety into everyday clinical practices when dealing with patients and their families. The program also addressed a very important subject of ‘event reporting’ so that institutions can learn from medical errors in order to implement change that ultimately improves patient safety in the healthcare systems.” David Mayer, Vice President of Quality and Safety for MedStar Health, said: “Patient safety and preventable medical harm are global issues. What WISH has done by partnering with MedStar Health is to bring a patient safety model to Qatar that is changing the world, so to speak. The program is educating the next generation of leaders on how to provide high quality safe care, be it to students or graduate physicians or faculty who have been practicing for 10-15 years.

“Too many patients around the world are harmed unintentionally by good care providers because of system or process issues, or just because we haven’t been trained in the tools and behaviors that have proven to reduce risk to patients that we care for. If we work together and apply these tools and techniques in our work environment, we will be able to drive preventable medical harm rates down to zero”, Mayer said.

The AELPS is an extension of WISH’s ongoing work to improve patient safety around the world.

In 2013, WISH led a major research forum chaired by Dr. Peter Pronovost, Director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at Johns Hopkins, and Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Senior Vice President for Patient Safety and Quality.

WISH also launched the Safer Care Accelerator Programme by Leading Health Systems Network (LHSN), in partnership with Imperial College London. Most recently, WISH presented findings of LHSN research this year, compiled in its 2016 report, at the second Global Summit on Patient Safety held in Bonn, Germany in March. (QNA)

Source: Fana News