Talk on Quality Improvement in Healthcare -A Primer

Quality Assurance Directorate NUMS organized a talk on “Improvement in Healthcare Quality -A Primer” by Dr Sarwat Hussain who is globally renowned radiologist, an innovator in healthcare quality, an academician, researcher and a professor across 4 continents on December 18, 2018 at Army Medical College, Rawalpindi. The participants were quality focal persons and senior representatives from NUMS Constituent Colleges, NUMS Specialty Institutes and NUMS Secretariat.

NUMS Pro-Vice Chancellor, Maj Gen (Retd) Muhammad Aslam, chaired the session. Followed by an interactive session by Dr Sarwat Hussain on Quality nomenclature, its different pillars and evaluation. He emphasized on the adoption of best practices around the globe, which will benefit and improve quality of healthcare through adoption and immediate implementation of standards like Joint Commission International Accreditation (JCIA), Care Quality Commission (CQC) and Punjab Healthcare Commission (PHC) etc. Moreover, he stressed the importance of goal setting on organization’s level for themselves and creating benchmarks worldwide in order to achieve excellence in the field of healthcare.

Dr Hussain further elaborated the importance of real-time data in the field and its implication in making timely interventions and improvements for patient’s benefit. Hence, every system that comprises of multiple interlinked processes should have checklists to avoid any commission or omission of error in continuous data analysis and making it accessible to Hospital Governance and leadership. He also emphasized on the importance of Healthcare Quality Literature and recommended to translate it into relevant native languages to make it more understandable to a larger community.  He shared that “Good Intentions and oath taking is not enough, the healthcare industry requires trained, skilled and applicable Quality Science”

At the end of the session, NUMS Pro-Vice Chancellor emphasized the importance of quality services in the field of Healthcare and the areas of improvement it requires. Care process should be safe and standardized for each patient all the time, every time, he added. He paid a vote of gratitude to the honorable Speaker and his team followed by shield presentation to speaker and a group photo of all participants.