The Royal Hospital won an Excellence Award for initiating multiple projects to improve performance in patient centered care. It was awarded to the hospital during the Second Annual GCC Patient Experience Summit held last September in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

The Director General of Royal Hospital, Dr. Qassem Al Salmi highlighted, that during 2017, the hospital inaugurated a training program on skills to improve performance through the training of 32 multidisciplinary employees of the hospital on LEAN methodologies by a LEAN consultant from the United States to improve performance. The launch of the teams of continuous performance improvement led to the initiation of more than 180 projects across multiple clinical and support departments. Many innovative projects and initiatives aimed at different aspects of the patient's experience, such as applying the appointment system at most of the national centers of the hospital to reduce the waiting time- improvement is still ongoing in this area – as well as to reduce the cancellation rates of surgical appointments.

Within this framework, health services are increasingly evolving and the expectations of patients and society are evolving. Dr Ismail Al Rashdi, RH Director of Quality & Patient Safety, described that the requirements of multiple stakeholders have necessitated health care providers trying to understand what the patient wants and react spontaneously to current trends and variations. The hospital's message changed, and its question is not just "How do we provide the best health services to the patient?" but the question now is: "How do we provide the best services that every patient wants in the best experience he can have while receiving excellent healthcare service?" To answer this new question, health institutions must change the patient's definition of vision and mission. The patient is not only a service recipient but also a "client" who must be provided with what he wants during his healthcare encounter or experience. Click Here for More Details