MBA 560 Healthcare Management | Medical Health Services

Questions:

1.Why is creating a safety culture important for Saudi Arabia healthcare organizations, medical employees and the patients? What are the benefits to all stakeholders?

2.Briefly describe the safety culture in your current or former healthcare organization, or in one with which you are familiar. Is/was the culture effective in preventing un-safe events? Explain why or why not.

Answers:

1.Health care organizations aim at dispensing quality services to people in order to promote a healthy standard of living. It is important to ensure that the stake holders involved in delivering medical health services must be effectively trained with respect to cultural competency. This is essential in order to dispense medical services that is culturally sensitive and would make the clients feel comfortable while availing the services. Research studies have revealed that most of the health care professionals working across various organizations in Saudi Arabia are from diverse cultural backgrounds (Almutairi, 2015,p.425). The patients while seeking care prefer professionals who belong to their cultural background in order to be assured about an optimal and culturally safe treatment procedure. This common culturally restricted belief must be done away with so as to assimilate the concept of cultural competence and make it universal while designing interventions for patients irrespective of their ethnic, racial, social, cultural or economic background.

Over the past two decades there has been a dramatic improvement of healthcare services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). As documented by Al-Harbi and his colleagues in the book ‘The changing face of healthcare in Saudi Arabia’  the improvement in access and provision of healthcare services by Saudi healthcare organizations has been challenging especially with regards to safety culture faced by their staff and patients among other stakeholders. This has highlighted the need to create and improve the quality of safety culture. Some of these challenges are as follows: an increase in demand for healthcare services as well as rise in costs, the ever-changing patterns of diseases, insufficient healthcare professionals, a sizeable yearly pilgrim population, escalating medical errors and lengthy waiting times. These are the reasons why it is essential to create a safety culture for Saudi Arabia healthcare organizations, medical employees and the patients.  A key policy that is already being implemented as a part of their development plan whereby all stakeholders will benefit in terms of sufficient healthcare professionals, reduced medical errors, fast service delivery, improved diagnosis and treatment procedures. This as a method of safety culture has ensured that there is appropriate levels of efficiency as well as quality medical services are achieved Al-Harbi et al (2008).

2.Saudi Arabia comprises of a cosmopolitan population with people working in various sectors belonging to different countries. However, Islam has been reported to be the dominant religion followed by the people across the nation. The religion is associated with a conservative mentality (Rasool,2014,p.75). Hence, most of the health care organizations fail to dispense culturally safe treatment.

However, DMC Sinai Grace Hospital is an organization whose safety culture has been consistent in improvement. Its Healthcare Program has a safety culture that shows a deep concern for both the patient’s and employee’s well-being which is reflected in all the levels and departments. It has done so through the elimination of anonymous observation a practice which afflicts many healthcare organizations. DMC Sinai Grace Hospital succeeded in this by ensuring that the management takes the time to do rounds in their facility in order to monitor as well as ensure that there is a positive reinforcement of company values for incidences both good and bad. The culture was effective in preventing un-safe events as cases of complaints from both the patients and employees went down which was also attributed to the rewards and incentives for employees for their adherence to DMC safety culture.

References:

Al-Harbi S, Y, Al-Omar B (2008) The changing face of healthcare in Saudi Arabia 28:243–50. doi:10.4103/0256-4947.51704 [PMC free article] [PubMed]

Almutairi, K. M. (2015). Culture and language differences as a barrier to provision of quality care by the health workforce in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Medical Journal, 36(4), 425.

DMC Sinai Grace Hospital Healthcare Program (2018) retrieved from  https://sgintmed.org/about-our-program/why-choose-sinai-grace accessed on 8 September, 2018

Rassool, G. H. (Ed.). (2014). Cultural competence in caring for muslim patients. Macmillan International Higher Education, pp. 74-77