International Congress Presentation in Turkey, March '09
Anna Allford, Project Manager, was invited to speak at the International Health Performance and Quality Congress taking place in Antalya, Turkey, between March 19th-21st.
This Conference was organised by the Ministry of Health of Turkey and they kindly paid my expenses so I took a couple of days annual leave and flew out. The flights there and back took the best part of a day as I had to change at Istanbul. This gave me time to look more at the geography of this huge country, bordered by Syria, Iraq, Iran, Armenia and Georgia. Turkey has always been an important area with regard to strategic ports and shipping lanes and this is reflected in its rich and chequered history.
I was just as much interested to learn more about how they organise healthcare across this vast country as I was keen to tell them all about our project and the types of work Patient Safety Champions and the Wider Network have already been involved in since their inception almost a year ago.
I arrived for the second day of the Conference on Friday and was scheduled to give my presentation on Saturday morning. I was told that as many as 1300 participants were registered in total and the Conference was spread over 3 parallel meeting rooms. The main room had translation into English through headphones as the Speakers gave their talks so I could only attend sessions in that room.
Healthcare professionals and policy makers from Turkey, USA, England and representatives of the World Health Organization discussed the main theme which was the ‘Promotion of Staff and Patient Safety' (their translation). Various topics included:
- New Roles and Experiences in Patient Safety;
- Reflections of Patient Safety and Patient Satisfaction;
- Patient Safety Implementations from Theory to Practice; and
- International Tendencies in Quality and Patient Safety.
Turkey has a similar Social Security system to cover the cost of public healthcare for citizens and there is a mixture of private care hospitals too. They aim to have a set of ‘Standard Operating Procedures' in order to provide standardised care no matter wherever anyone should live. I understood this to be comparable to our system of ‘Patient Care Pathways'. There were concerns that sometimes independent decisions by clinicians to order tests or perform procedures could be hampered by what the Ministry of Health define required for specific conditions but this system would also ensure that access to appropriate treatment is more equitable - a fine balance that many healthcare systems have to work towards achieving.
I was delighted to be first Speaker on the morning of the 21st and gave a presentation about the project, the role of the Champions plus some of the work to date, and with how we wish to develop the Wider Network. I also told delegates that we have discovered that in many areas there is a need for more Champions. The project is looking to develop a model that helps facilitate ‘Associate' Patient Safety Champions locally to support current Champions. We are currently discussing the way forward with the project team to ensure we have things in place before advertising for these new roles.
Anna Allford, Project Manager
(left the project February 2010)
Click here to view the presentation
