The Ministry of Health (MOH) has launched today (We all are responsible) Initiative, as a progressive step towards patient experience. The initiative is designed to be launched in various hospitals across the Kingdom, to bring different views together, to listen to patients, to enhance intimacy between service providers (hospital leaders) and service recipients (patients and their families), to make the voice of service recipients heard by officials, to identify patients' needs, to find effective solutions to patients and their families' challenges, and to activate the role of Patient Relations and Rights Departments across health facilities. The idea of the initiative is to hold periodical meetings for leaders and directors of health facilities with patients and their families, to elaborate on challenges faced and medical services provided, to discuss and to find solutions by both sides, while setting a time-frame for implementation.
Accordingly, the initiative's mechanism features periodic meeting every three months by all Patient Relations and Rights Departments across the region's health facilities, while setting up a leader-based committee (consisting of facility director, medical team, head of patient relations and rights department, nutrition and pharmacy, and support services). Through this initiative, MOH seeks to secure a number of positive objectives, including patient's feeling of senior officer's intimacy with them, finding solution within the facility without escalation, saving time through speedy response, boosting service effectiveness by projecting it through the patient's view, as well as enhancing patient's satisfaction.
Planning to enhance and develop engagement tools with patients and their families is one of the key missions of the Patient Experience Center. This will allow them to give their feedback on the health services provided. Hence, the Center will be able to prepare and develop patient experience-related policies, processes, as well as tools to address patients' feedback and complaints. This, in turn, will secure satisfaction of patients and their families, and allow further consideration of their complaints raise to the Center, as well as notices referred by regional patient experience centers across the Kingdom, in order to solve them in coordination with all stakeholders in compliance with the adopted processes. The Center also technically supervises the patient relations and rights across MOH's Health Affairs, health facilities, as well as the private health sector.
The Center effectively participates in identifying education programs and media material to update patients and their families on their rights and duties, in collaboration with MOH's Communication, Relations and Health Awareness General Department (CRHAGD), and in coordination with all private and MOH's health relations and rights-related stakeholders. In the same vein, the Center also conducts statistical studies and research to determine challenges of patients and their families in health facilities, to measure their satisfactions, to analyze data, to adopt policies and processes to solve them with the Research and Studies General Department (RSGD), to take part in plans, training courses and programs for patient relations and rights staff. This will boost and develop performance, deliver assistance in coordination with the Training and Scholarship Department, take part in service-related committees and forums, prepare periodical reports on activities, achievements, and development suggestions and submit them to H.E. the Health Minister.