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Saturday, December 5 - 2009

Tawam Hospital focuses on patient safety

  • United Arab Emirates: Tuesday, June 23 - 2009 at 12:25
  • PRESS RELEASE

Tawam Hospital staff and patients are celebrating this month the first anniversary of the Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Patient (CUSP) program, an initiative designed to help ensure patient safety.

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The program allows frontline caregivers to identify and address hazards through steps such as measuring the safety-related culture of the unit, leveraging the wisdom of frontline personnel about the dangers facing patients, and opening the lines of communication between caregivers, managers and executives.

The CUSP program, developed by Johns Hopkins physicians in 2001, is a mission-tested approach that has elevated safety consciousness across clinical units at the John Hopkins Hospital and numerous facilities outside the United States. It has helped to significantly reduce the incidence of surgical-site infections, ventilator-associated pneumonia, bloodstream infections, and wrong-site surgeries.

According to hospital staff, Tawam has seen a number of positive changes since implementing CUSP last year. They include reducing turnaround time from 4.5 hours to 1.5 hours for many critical and routine lab results in the intensive care unit, and implementing a medication safety and data transfer program, which has resulted in a quicker average time for nurses to locate a medication.

Tawam Hospital managers also have found that implementing CUSP has led hospital staff to be more open about reporting incidents and errors. CUSP's slogan, "Learning from Defects," has become a deeply ingrained part of the hospital's culture.

"The CUSP concept is a new and unique initiative to bring to a hospital in the Middle East. Tawam is one of the few UAE healthcare institutions to launch a patient safety project such as this and we are committed to move forward with it."


said Steve Matarelli, M.D., chief operating officer, Tawam Hospital.

At Tawam Hospital, the intensive care, neonatal intensive care and pediatric oncology units inaugurated CUSP in 2008. According to hospital administration, these units were selected because of their high concentration of patients and potential for safety risks. In 2009, three more units will join CUSP.

Tawam Hospital is managed by John Hopkins Medicine and owned and operated by Seha, the Abu Dhabi Health Services Company, which is responsible for the curative activities of all the public hospitals and clinics in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.
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Notes and media contacts

About Johns Hopkins Medicine International
Johns Hopkins Medicine International (JHI) facilitates the global development of the Johns Hopkins Medicine mission: to improve the health of the community and the world by setting the standard of excellence in medical education, research and clinical care.

As the international access point to thousands of Johns Hopkins experts in medicine, nursing, public health and health care administration, JHI coordinates treatment for out-of-town patients who travel to Baltimore and for local patients with limited English proficiency. It also provides services in hospital management, health care consulting and clinical education through strategic alliances and affiliations in the Middle East, Latin America, North America, Europe and Asia.

About Health Authority Abu Dhabi
The Health Authority Abu Dhabi is responsible for ensuring excellent quality healthcare for the people of the Emirate. It defines the strategy for the health system, monitors and analyses the health status of the population and performance of the system, shapes the regulatory framework for the health system, inspects against regulations and enforces standards, encourages adoption of world-class quality & performance targets by all providers of healthcare services, plans capacities and service levels, drives programmes to improve societal health, defines minimum standards for health service providers and health professionals, and regulates scope of services and premiums & reimbursement rates of providers and payers.

About Seha
The Abu Dhabi Health Services Company was recently launched on 29th December 2007 under Emiri Decree No. (10) of 2007 and owned by the Government of Abu Dhabi. While the full name of the company is Abu Dhabi Health Services Company, the corporate name is Seha. Seha is Health in Arabic.

The establishment of Seha is part of the Government of Abu Dhabi's healthcare sector reform initiatives and represents another step in the realization of His Highness Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE's vision to provide the people of the UAE with the best healthcare facilities in the world, locally.

Seha is an independent, public joint stock company (PJSC) created to manage and develop the curative activities of the public hospitals and clinics of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

Seha owns and operates 12 hospital facilities, 2,644 licensed beds, and more than 40 Ambulatory and Primary Healthcare Clinics.

Seha is one of the largest employers in the Middle East with more than 15,500 doctors, nurses and other clinical staff and administration employed.

Seha delivers world class healthcare, locally, by partnering with internationally recognized healthcare leaders. Our partners include Johns Hopkins Medicine, Cleveland Clinic, Bumrungrad International, New England Center for Children, Vamed, and Vienna Medical University.

For media enquiries, please contact:
Sumaya Al Harrasi
Section Head, Business Development
Tawam Hospital
Tel.: +971 3 7075131
Mobile: +971 504487831
971 504487831
Fax: +971 3 7075192

Zeina El-Hakam
ASDA'A Burson Marsteller Public Relations - Dubai
www.asdaa.com
T: +971 4 3355 969
M: +971 50 877 3400
F: +971 4 3356 080

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