The Ministry of Health yesterday sent an official dispatch to departments of health and hospitals across the country requesting improvements in hospital quality management, patient safety, and recommendations for preventing medical incidents.
Accordingly, the Ministry required hospitals to increase training on ensuring patient safety as we as the responsibility of each medical staff. Hospital managers will be punished if they don’t report medical incidents.
In particular, the Ministry of Health required medical establishments to review unsafe risks, classify risks, prioritize treatment, and immediately overcome high unsafe risks that affect patients' lives and medical staff.
Moreover, hospitals should have a periodic review of technical and professional processes, standardize, amend and supplement promptly, especially outdated processes such as classification of emergency patients, unsafe surgical procedures, health care-associated infections, diagnostic errors, management of drugs, equipment and medical supplies in emergency rooms, intensive care units and surgical procedure rooms.
In particular, the Ministry of Health requested that immediately after receiving the medical incident report, infirmary heads need to assign staff to reassure patients and relatives and have appropriate solutions as well as calm down medical staff and practitioners who get involved in occurring incidents, avoiding overlooking system errors.
