WHO Mission, Meets IHN’s Quality and Monitoring Team

Proposed Collaboration Aims at Transforming IHN into a Patient-Safety-Friendly Facility

Karachi

July 10, 2019

Indus Health Network (IHN) take ‘Quality and patient Safety’ as a strategic priority and takes up every possible opportunity to improve upon its quality standards. WHO Regional Advisor Dr. Letaief Mondher; Dr. Jamal Nasher; Dr. Zulfiqar Khan; Dr. Bassim Zayed; Dr. Donna Forsyth from National Health Services England, Dr. Mathew Neilsen; and Ms Afifa Baloch met Dr. Fozia Asif,QIPS IHN; Dr. Mirza Basit Baig , Executive Director, Quality and Monitoring Directorate IHN; and Dr. Ashar Alam, Medical Director, TIH .

The mission visited Pakistan in order to develop National Quality Policy and Strategy (NQPS) and to transform a few of public and private health facilities into patient-safety-friendly hospitals through WHO’s flagship Patient Safety Friendly Hospital Initiative (PSFHI).

The general objective of the mission is to support development and implementation of a Quality and Patient Safety programme, in Pakistan. The mission shall bring together a group of international quality, patient Safety, and IPC experts along with senior WHO staff, who would perform a review of the existing policies and strategies within the country to identify gaps, challenges, as well as avenues of improvement.

A joint mission of WHO and the Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office (EMRO) of the WHO comprising seven international experts visited to help Pakistani hospitals on patient safety strategy issues and to transform these facilities into patient-safety-friendly hospitals. As a quick proposed solution, the WHO will provide a full technical support to launch the PSFHI in selected hospitals. While in the long term, further support will be given to develop a comprehensive NQPS that can be integrated and institutionalized in the country’s health system to ensure accountability, efficiency, and safety of a proposed  patient -centred health system. The initiative will help IHN to enhance capacity building in Quality and Patient Safety.