His Excellency, the Acting Minister of Health, Eng. Adel bin Muhammad Faqih, made clear that improving health services is an ongoing, unending process, and that keeping a close eye on quality improvement is also an unceasing mission not confined within the bounds of a certain period of time. He added that all hospitals and healthcare providers in both public and private sectors in Saudi Arabia shall be subject to this process.
This came during the opening session of the regional consultative meeting for Eastern Mediterranean countries organized by the Central Board for Accreditation of Health Institutions (CBAHI), in collaboration with WHO regional office for East Mediterranean region held in Jeddah on Monday June 8, 2014, corresponding to Sha'ban 11, 1435 H.
He said that the meeting was aimed at consulting international experts from the World Health Organization (WHO), as well as other countries and organizations regarding the policies, tools and measures that should be adopted for improving tools of control, matching, standardization and coordination to ensure quality improvement.
As for the latest developments related to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus (MERS CoV), he said that reports are being issued on a daily basis, and that the public is updated on cases. “As you may have noticed,” he added, “cases have significantly declined, thanks to Allah in the first place, and then the cooperation and concerted efforts by different parties with the Ministry of Health (MOH), in addition to tremendous efforts exerted by colleagues at the Ministry to improve preventive and anti-infection measures.”
He went on to say, regardless of the decline in the diseased cases, we in the Ministry of Health are still keeping maximum precautionary and preventive measures. Meanwhile, we do not take such decline as a pretext for ceasing or reducing the efforts needed to combat the disease.
He noted that all paper documents available in the Ministry have been reviewed, and that unreported information from hospitals not pertaining the Ministry has been scrutinized, besides matching the tests conducted at other hospitals but not included, and some records were also verified and matched. He added that the action taken by the Ministry was conducting close scrutiny and verification of every single case separately, in the course of two years, investigating its status – whether detected in non-MOH hospitals or in the Ministry’s record.
Regarding the "shaking-up" of the leaderships of the Ministry, Faqih stressed that he is not for the use of such a term as “shake-up”; rather, it is natural and normal that level of performance within any administrative system is subject to review, and that in case of any defect, failure or opportunity for improvement, replacement is undertaken accordingly. “But we have our colleagues who are sincerely dedicated to work. Those should be encouraged, prompted and rewarded, whereas those whose work falls short of expectation should be replaced by more competent ones,” he remarked.
The 3-day consultative meeting organized by the Saudi Central Board for Accreditation of Health Institutions (CBAHI), in collaboration with WHO regional office, took place this morning under the auspices of His Excellency, the acting Minister of Health, Eng. Adel bin Muhammad Faqih. Participants were more than fifty experts and specialists in the field of quality health services, representatives of health ministries in the Arab countries, Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. They gathered to discuss ways of improving quality of health services, safety of patients, the impact of accreditation systems, and taking a closer look at the experiences of the countries with health accreditation systems, most notably Saudi Arabia, perceived the largest healthcare market in the Middle East.
“After CBAHI has become fully operational, we are now in a better position to meet the challenge to improve quality of services in the medical sector,” the Minister said while addressing the opening session. “Accreditation by CBAHI has been optional up to the moment. However, we seek to set this accreditation as a prerequisite for obtaining and renewing permits and licenses for medical institutions. Accreditation will be directly linked to permits, but such measure requires time and proper organization.”
He underscored the importance of the role of the meeting, attended by a constellation of international experts, in indentifying the best practical ways of upgrading levels of healthcare quality. He stressed the significance of scientific steps needed to be taken in accordance with recommendations by the experts following this meeting to achieve the excellence that the Ministry is seeking after, in order to provide best-quality healthcare for patients in the Kingdom.