THE DATABASE
In building up 21st-century medical cities, the Ministry of Health is digitalizing unified patient records to streamline medical care.
How would you position PMAH within the healthcare landscape of Saudi Arabia, and what is your main expertise?
PMAH is a 500-bed general hospital that caters to surgery, medicine, and emergency care. We have a large emergency room with about 96 beds. The room is divided into two areas: the main emergency department and the respiratory zone. This is for patients who suffer from communicable respiratory diseases such as MERS-CoV and tuberculosis. We have stringent criteria about keeping patients who might have communicable respiratory diseases away from other patients. Our emergency room is extremely busy, and we receive about 150,000200,000 patients per year. The hospital is fully digitalized and paperless. We have 14 operating theaters that utilize seven rooms in the hospital, which opened six years ago. We have a medical department, a surgical department, a family medicine department, and an ICU, which has 34 beds. It will have 95 when fully operational. Currently, the entire hospital has 334 operational beds, and we hope to have the entire hospital operational by the end of 2020. patients, for which we specialize. PMAH is known as a trauma and coronavirus hospital. We receive almost all coronavirus patients from across the Kingdom and have excellent outcomes, with lower mortality rates than other hospitals. We recently formed an agreement with the Ministry of Health to be the ECMO center for patients with low oxygen levels. At present, we provide care to a maximum of four patients at the same time, and this program is extremely successful.
What are some of your best practices in terms of how you built up your capacity in trauma?
We want to make people passionate about trauma care, which is a challenge because it encompasses more than just providing medical care. PMAH runs one of the medical lead programs as part of the national trauma program. Our people have contributed at the ministry in terms of trauma development. Trauma care, for us, is not a choice. It is something we have to do because our hospital is easily accessible and is close to the highway. For that reason, we receive many victims of motor vehicle accidents. We must be ready to treat them. We seek to become a Level-1 trauma hospital with a consultant in-house 24/7.
What are the strategic priorities to get everything up and running by 2021, and what are the ambitions of the hospital?
they are the cornerstones of the process. Hiring and acquiring them is not easy right now as there is a great deal of competition. In the last three years, we have improved the hospital in terms of the working environment, which has changed the way physicians look at the hospital. They look at the hospital as a trauma and coronavirus center, but want to work on their own field of expertise. After changing the image of the hospital, people now understand we perform elective procedures and have elective admissions. We worked hard on the lab to provide all the different tests and worked on the radiology department where we do radiological imaging. Right now, we are working on attracting doctors to work in the hospital. One of the obstacles we face right now is supply, which should improve with the clustering of hospitals. ✖