ABU DHABI // Every hospital, health centre and clinic in Abu Dhabi is to be rated for the quality of health care they provide.
Hospitals will evaluated on criteria such as survival rates, readmission rates and infection rates. Failure to meet standards will trigger snap inspections, the evaluation results will be made public and hospitals that consistently fail face closure.
“The public can see first hand who are the providers with the best quality and who are the providers with the weakest quality,” said Maha Barakat, director general of the Health Authority Abu Dhabi.
“It is a reputational risk to those who are not doing well and a great boost to those who are doing well. It is a win-win situation.”
The evaluation process has already begun. Every hospital in Abu Dhabi has been asked to answer 17 questions relating to performance. The number of metrics will eventually be expanded to about 200.
“If there are worrying signs from this data then that will trigger a snap inspection of that healthcare facility,” said Dr Barakat. “This is over and above the regular inspections we do as a healthcare regulator.
“This is one of the most significant things we can do for improving quality of care — that we do not wait for the complaint to come from the patient or the complication to arise.
“We proactively try to detect weaknesses in healthcare providers and then help them improve on those weaknesses.”
The system will begin with hospitals but will later apply to all clinics and health centres.
“So eventually every healthcare provider — both in the public and private sector — will be subject to these mandatory quality metrics,” said Dr Barakat.
The results will be made public to incentivise improvement, and there are other measures if this does not encourage health facilities to improve.
“We can ask the well performing facilities to help the poorer performing facilities. We have other measures such as linking payment to quality.”
In the worst-case scenario, the authority could also force a healthcare provider to stop its services or even shut a hospital, said Dr Barakat.
Retention of medical staff, Emiratisation and reducing the number of patients travelling overseas for treatment are among her priorities.
“We are the guardians of the next few generations and we have to ensure that we do everything possible right,” she said.
“We have several priorities. Quality must be at the top.”
That will come by increasing trust in local healthcare providers and providing services where there is a gap, said Dr Barakat.
“One more priority is working on retention of the workforce and Emiratisation. Emiratis will be 30 per cent of the workforce by 2030. So we need to work very hard at trying to strengthen the number of local healthcare professional workers.”
To tackle that, the authority is working on plans to increase medical educational options.
“Hopefully in the next five years will will have another one or two medical schools in Abu Dhabi,” she said.
“Clearly we have very competent doctors and nurses but we have to encourage retention within specialities so they are not encouraged to go into administration or to business.
“These are definitely huge priorities and we are pulling out all the stops to solidify the workforce.”
jbell@thenational.ae