Practi-Med Dubai to address medical error and patient safety

Today medical error prevention and patient safety are among the chief concerns of clinicians and hospital administrators around the world. The implementation of internationally recognized clinical quality standards focused on patient safety is a major focus of the strategic relationship between Dubai Healthcare City (DHCC) and Harvard Medical International (HMI).

Practi-Med Dubai (December 8-10, 2003) the first in a series of HMI-DHCC Lifelong Learning Programs, will feature a lecture on patient safety, by Dr. Tejal Gandhi, Director of Patient Safety at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

"Practi-Med Dubai will introduce concepts and suggestions for improvements and give providers the tools to go back to their hospitals and clinics and start to create a culture of safety," said Dr. Gandhi. "The biggest issue is lack of awareness of the issues, and lack of understanding of how to evaluate error. My talk at Practi-Med Dubai will provide this information."

Dr. Gandhi, who is also a primary care physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital, believes that outpatient settings deserve more attention because they are such a large part of healthcare. The outpatient setting, she said, "is actually more difficult to influence because there are so many practices and providers with varying resources and varying systems in place."

As the patient safety director for Brigham and Women's Hospital, Gandhi leads a team working to improve patient care and reduce errors in the hospital, from educating the staff about patient safety to improving systems for analyzing error. Often she finds that clear mistakes, such as performing the wrong procedure, have deeper roots in communication and teamwork. Part of her role is to increase awareness of medical error and promote a culture of safety in the organization.

Gandhi said that clinicians' limited amount of time is a factor affecting patient safety. "People need this to be part of their job, so they have dedicated time," she said, to spend improving safety. Gandhi hopes that devoting time and resources to safety will help create an environment where people feel safe reporting errors when they occur, where there are systems in place to analyze these errors, where incidents are investigated to determine their root causes, and where there is follow-through to ensure changes are made.

Practi-Med Dubai (www.practi-med.com/dubai) will bring together leading clinicians from Harvard Medical School and health care providers in the Middle East to discuss the latest research on healthcare challenges common to the Middle Eastern countries. In addition to patient safety, topics include the rise of cardiovascular and infectious disease, as well as cancer, diabetes, obesity, and the care of children and expectant mothers.