Institute for Healthcare Improvement chief visits HMC

Dr Kedar Mate, president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) visited HMC for two days to meet with senior leaders and quality improvement advisers across the facility. The visit, which marks the 10-year partnership between IHI and HMC’s Hamad Healthcare Quality Institute (HHQI), helped reaffirm HMC’s ongoing commitment to quality improvement and patient safety.The visiting dignitary was received by HE the Minister of Public Health Dr Hanan Mohamed al-Kuwari. Dr Mate reiterated his recognition of the great capacity and capability for quality improvement within the public healthcare system in Qatar. He commended the value of a committed leadership who are so engaged in all aspects of quality and patient safety and also stated the benefit of having expertise provided by HHQI experts across the corporation, which has led to a high percentage of interdisciplinary teams work on improvement programmes to bring about real system changes.The IHI chief met with several strategic leaders at HMC and held discussions on the future of quality, patient safety, value improvement, system-wide flow and patient experience and staff engagement.He interacted with several HMC leaders, hospital facility CEOs, medical directors and the heads of departments across the organisation in a “meet the expert” session. He shared his knowledge and experience of change ideas that can help healthcare systems, such as Qatar’s healthcare system, to fill what he referred to as “the know - do gap”. Dr Mate first proposed to the value of focusing on the whole system quality approach, which is part of a unified approach to building responsive and resilient healthcare systems. This offers a more holistic approach to quality management where front-liners are guided by focused leadership vision that is in strategic alignment with all business processes and services to meet customer needs. The IHI chief proposed another improvement area around eliminating wasteful variation in clinical care by understanding the performance across the system and learning from the best practices that exist within the system. He underlined the importance of having strong data and the ability to analyse this data to make better informed decisions about systems improvements.Dr Mate attended several value improvements huddles in Hamad General Hospital, Qatar Rehabilitation Institute and Communicable Disease Centre and met with medical directors, CEOs, leads and frontline teams within these facilities. He expressed his admiration for the staff engagement on different improvement efforts and the great ownership and deep understating of QI methods and tools evident across the organisation.