The theme for this year patient safety day is “medication without
harm” and the theme for the Symposium is “Patient Safety Starts with Me”.
The First National Symposium on Patient Safety started on
October, 23, 2022 (Sunday) in collaboration with WHO Maldives, with health care
professionals from different disciplines across the nation. Healthcare
Professionals include Doctors, Nurses, Lab Technologists, Community Health
Workers and Health service discipline Lecturers. This Symposium has been
conducted hybrid with a total of 75 in person and more than 100 online
participation. The in-person session included 2 participants from each
atoll, including Male’ Atoll and 3 to 7 participants from hospitals within
Greater Male Area. The online participants were from Health Centers across the
country. Opportunity was given to all Island Health Centers to participate
online in the symposium.
The symposium covered Patient safety, safe medication,
medication without harm, infection prevention and control, Hospital acquired
infection surveillance, healthcare waste management, equipment safety,
collaborative pharmaceutical care for patient safety, safe surgical checklist,
incorporation of Infection prevention and control in teaching curriculum, patient
safety incident reporting and learning systems, and training on undertaking
point-of-care quality improvement initiatives, The symposium gave participants
opportunity to discuss cases review them with experts and identify learning and
practice change.
While all the participants were awarded participation
certificates, the Infection Control and Prevention with hospital acquired
infection surveillance component started with a pre-test and at the end of 2
day session, participants were given a post-test and those who reached a
post-test mark above 80% were awarded competency certificates. Similarly, the Point of Care Quality
Improvement training was also conducted in a similar manner and those
participants who received a post-test mark above 80% were awarded competency
certificates. Further, a total of 30 Quality Improvement Projects were designed
and presented to the participants with the assistance of facilitators. The projects
that are successfully implemented will get the opportunity to be published in
an international journal,
Opportunity to showcase quality improvement projects by
different hospitals were given as experience sharing. A total of 12 local
experts and 21 foreign experts facilitated the symposium.
The symposium will conclude on October 27, 2022. This Symposium
was conducted by the Quality Assurance and Regulation Division (QARD) of
Ministry of Health in collaboration with WHO. In addition to MoH and WHO, the
Point of Care Training was conducted in collaboration with National Quality of
Care Network India.
On behalf of Ministry of Health, QARD thank WHO, NQOCN and the
local facilitators for their time and the participants for their enthusiasm.