Recently, Qatar ranked fifth in the world by the Legatum Institute, a London-based think tank, for improved life expectancy, better health outcomes, and investment in health infrastructure. It is the only country in the region to secure place in the top five in annual prosperity index, placing behind Singapore, Luxembourg, Japan and Switzerland.
Qatar’s premier and not-for-profit health care provider, Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), is known for the best care and services it offers and its open-mindedness in experimenting new initiatives to enhance its services. Noteworthy among them is Nursing Informatics (NI), which is a specialty that integrates nursing science with multiple information management and analytical sciences to identify, define, manage, and communicate data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in nursing practice. It supports nurses, consumers, patients and the entire team that comes in close contact with the healthcare service and thus in turn helps to achieve the desired outputs. NI works through the use of information structures, processes and technology.
The concept was introduced in HMC in 2006 and is the first in the Middle East to implement this new system that manages nursing workforce and acuity-based patient assignment.
“The strategy of the department focuses on nursing informatics researches and professional development in healthcare informatics and information technology for nurses to promote the best use of clinical information and technological systems for the improvement of patient care delivery in HMC,” Dr Wasmiya Dalhem, Executive Director of Nursing Informatics Department (NID) at HMC.
By preparing clinical information system, HMC has also provided an atmosphere conducive for the expansion of NI. Working absolutely in line with the fact that ‘empowerment of nurses is vital in healthcare’ HMC always stood for their empowerment. It holds regular e-learning training courses, CIS courses and IT courses to equip nurses for this NI journey. HMC also launched the Nursing Informatics Research Community Program to develop a community in Qatar for the empowerment of nurses to implement best practices and deliver the highest quality of patient care. The programme was developed in collaboration with Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar Computing Research Institute and the College of Science and Engineering along with Carnegie Mellon University-Qatar .
HMC’s contribution for Qatar’s exponential healthcare growth is praiseworthy. Its growth in healthcare is the result of the positive attitude instilled by the Qatari leadership on its team towards change and experimenting new initiatives and this attitude, backed by arrant willpower and perfect confidence, is more than enough to take Qatar’s healthcare to even more heights.
