By Cinatra Fernandes
KUWAIT CITY, Sept 15: NBK Children’s Hospital commenced a threeday conference on ‘Safety in Cancer Care’ on Saturday at its premises, in keeping with the International Patient Safety Day, a global campaign held on Sept 17 for all stakeholders in the healthcare system to work together to improve patient safety.
The conference focuses on patients’ as well as healthcare workers’ safety and includes general and specialised sessions and workshops that cover a broad range of topics from ethical principles and strategies in patient safety, reducing medical errors through better documentation to equipment safety and management, blood safety, occupational hazards in the healthcare delivery system. Also featured is an interactive patient safety pathways programme with nine booths that deliver pertinent information as well as a workshop on safety competencies for healthcare workers. The last day of the conference will have a twohour evening programme celebrating the International Patient Safety Day and its current theme of ‘Digitization and Patient Safety’.
Dr Maitham Husain, Director of NBK Children’s Hospital, shared that this conference is the second held at the hospital this year. The last conference held in February focussed on Values in Leadership in healthcare organisations.
He pointed out that while the participants may have attended several conferences on the topic of patient safety, it is especially pertinent to the hospital as they deal with a very specific population i.e. children and moreover treating specific ailments such as cancer. Improving patient safety for the target patient group calls for the strategic initiatives of establishing safe programmes with cancerspecific safety related issues and establishing chemotherapy and blood product incident registry in order to decrease the negative incidents related to chemotherapy treatment or blood product use and provide a safe physical environment for cancer patients.
He also drew attention to the fact that while most medical conferences are often targeted towards a certain subset of healthcare workers, be it, physicians or nurses, in a hospital setting, they all work together. “Patient care is never an art or design or decision of one profession. So we have made the strategic decision that all our educational delivery will be in the hospital setting. The hospital is not only a place to deliver care but also share our many experiences, learn together and exchange our values here.”
He reminded the participants of the hospital’s vision, to provide comprehensive care for children with hematological diseases and cancer and stressed that comprehensive care does not only pertain to medical protocol or nursing but he shared it is the hospital’s mission to deliver medical as well as rehabilitative care for children.
While the focus of health systems have been delivery of medical care, he noted that chronic conditions, including cancer, require a lot of rehabilitative services. Again, he clarified that rehabilitation does not only allude to physical properties but educational, social and psychological needs. He affirmed that sustained cancer treatment would require children to be rehabilitated in the school system, society and psychologically.
“Patient safety is a strategic direction for the hospital”, he said and shared his hopes that hospitals become more proactive in dealing with patients’ safety instead of being reactive.
He highlighted one of the hospital’s core value as being that of collaboration and shared that this conference was a result of a cooperation between different organisations such as the Central Blood Bank, Kuwait University’s Department of Health Informatics and Information Management, Kuwait Society of Biomedical Engineers, and the Kuwait Public Health Society.