His Excellency the Vice Minister of Health, Mr. Hamad bin Muhammad Al-Doweila‘, highlighted that the Ministry of Health (MOH) currently shows keen interest in developing human resources and information technology, and now is faced with tremendous work to develop the health care.
Following his participation today (Wednesday) as a keynote speaker at the conference titled: “Culture of Customer Service in the Public Sector”, which is held by the Ministry of Civil Service and organized by the Institute of Public Administration (IPA), over the period from November 17th-19th, 2015 (corresponding to Safar 05th-07th, 1437H) at Prince Salman Conferences Center at the IPA's Headquarter in Riyadh, Al-Doweila said: "The unified e-health file for patient is applicable, but it is difficult to identify a date to link patient information, as we must consider the resources for its application, and we need to make a link with the patient's identity number, a work which is associated with several bodies".
Besides, Al-Doweila’ indicated that the MOH has recently held several coordination meetings in this regard with two Saudi companies (Elm and Aramco), and it is keen to utilize the expertise of other sector; in such a manner that serves the public interest and achieves the desired benefit. He commended the e-expertise of both the Ministry of Interior (MOI) and Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MOCI), stressing that the MOH is striving to improve its electronic services and achieve excellence in this field.
Concerning human resources, he underscored that the MOH is keen to attract qualified competencies and achieve optimum utilization of all available human cadres, where it works within its current plan to develop capabilities of its employees and raise level of their performance, in an endeavor to improve the health services and meet the citizens' needs.
In the work paper he delivered before the conference Al-Doweila’ said: "The MOH has provided several initiatives to improve the patient's experience at the MOH's facilities, such as those model initiatives implemented by a number of medical cities, including launching a website for the initiatives office, inspecting patients at hospitalization section by nursing staff every hour, starting the project of "Patient Portal", providing vehicles for transporting patients, noise reducing initiative and the initiative of calling the discharged patient to check on his condition.
He pointed out that the future steps of improving the patient's experience will be based on conducting studies about the needs of patients, their families and customers of health facilities; with regard to what they are looking for and what they wish. He added that these steps will focus on principles of transparency, giving the correct information and temporal-spatial convenience of patient, benefiting of the availability of several points of contact with the patient to educate him and increase his role in treatment, opening channels to collect proposals and enquiries of the patients and their families, spreading an environment of innovation and creativity at the front lines, giving employees a full opportunity to better serving the patients and improving the experience of the patient and his family.
Within the same vein, Al-Doweila’ noted that the MOH is currently working on launching ten initiatives to improve the patient experience, through an effective model axis focusing on the patient, including the provision of 4,000 beds, establishing 200 primary health care centers for vaccinations and caring for diabetics, developing and expanding home care services, enhancing quality and safety programs all over the MOH's facilities, participation of the private sector in centers of vaccination and follow-up of diabetes at the level of different gatherings in pharmacies and establishing partnership with private institutions. He added that the initiatives focusing on the axis of human resources include honing the skills of Saudis working in the field of health care at the MOH, introducing performance evaluation process to increase the productivity of workers in the medical field and experimenting the project of creative productivity in 20 hospitals and 40 primary health care centers, that is to be added to the initiatives focusing on the axis of information technology through launching digital applications and programs for patients, on a large scale.
The Vice Minister reviewed the Experience Radar study which proved that price is the most important element in procurement process at most sectors, while the health sector is an exception to this rule, as the personal experience was proven to be the main element when choosing any health facility to visit, (i.e. the personal experience and recommendation from a friend or relative is regarded the most important elements for choosing a facility to visit). He added that the study showed that the reputation of the facility or health institution and personal experience are considered the main elements for choosing process by an average of 72%, while 70% of the people believed that the easy access and procedures, availability of most services they need under one roof and the self service via smartphones and Internet are of the most important elements of choice between different health facilities.
“The challenges facing the hospitals include lack of focusing on patients, as integrated health care of all specialties should be provided to consider the patient the center of attention, a matter which leads to doing a little work in everything, unclear vision of the value added to patients, irregular implementation of programs concerned with improving the patient experience and inability to reach the degree of excellence in the field of patient experience,” said Al-Doweila’.
It is noteworthy that the conference aims at contributing to building an outstanding customer service culture in the public sector, in order to meet the needs and desires of customers and work to achieve more that your expectations on the highest level of quality and satisfaction. The conference also sheds light on the reality of customer service culture at the public sector in the Kingdom, as well as means of developing them to keep pace with aspirations and expectations of the customers, in light of the administrative, economic, social and technological developments, in addition to successive developments of excellence means in customer service. Moreover, the conference touched upon the local, regional and international experiences that can be utilized and implemented in the public sector to raise the level of governmental services provided to customers.