As part of its initiatives to promote the healthcare services quality in its health facilities, the Ministry of Health (MOH) has recently launched the Patient Care Pathways (PCP) Program. It has been designed, with a view to building internal competences and applying the best world practices on the local scale, as well as providing better healthcare services to patients, in line with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and the National Transformation Program (NTP).
The MOH has pointed out that this program is reckoned the first of its kind within the framework of the MOH’s Hospitals Development Strategy, which aims to provide integrated and highly efficient healthcare services, by means of achieving the optimum utilization of the capacity and capabilities of hospitals and healthcare centers. This can be achieved through a number of initiatives, including improving access to the medical services, lowering rates of the patients’ absenteeism from their scheduled appointments, reducing the waiting lists in outpatient clinics during a limited period, as well as training the healthcare specialists.
Within the same vein, the MOH has underlined that the PCP Program has been applied across the MOH’s hospitals; in an endeavor to achieve better outcomes for patients through using it for the performance measures and administrative changes. The PCP is an integrated program, designed to create a high efficiency and liability at hospitals, and thus achieving better healthcare to patients through monitoring hospitals and key performance indicators locally. The program focuses on the basic sections within 31 identified hospitals, such as emergency section, outpatient section, inpatient section. Besides, more than 300 Saudi specialists have been trained to improve the workflow approaches in the hospital and the quality of healthcare services, in addition to the beneficiaries’ satisfaction of these services.