Improving Patient Safety Culture: Project Proposal, Saudi Hospital

This project proposal outlines a plan to improve patient safety culture in a hospital located in Saudi Arabia. The project aims to address issues such as ineffective management, outdated technology, and poor patient care, which have led to a decline in patient flow. The proposal details the curre...Read More

MSc Year 2: Project Proposal
Student Name
Student ID
Word Count (Guide is 1,500)
Draft Dissertation Title Improving standard of safety healthcare service through a
safety culture management process in a hospital Saudi
Arabia
ANALYSINGSTRATEGIES AND METHODS FOR IMPROVING
PATIENT SAFETY CULTURE IN HOSPITAL
(Please check your intended approach)
Full Implementation
Project Implementation Plan
ANALYZING TRATEGIES AND METHODS FOR IMPROVING PAIENT SAFETY
CULTURE IN HOSPITAL, SAUDI ARABIA
ORGANIZATION BACKGROUND
The hospital is a public health institution funded by the Saudi Arabia government and located
the Central Region. The hospital specializes on curing common diseases affecting young
children as well as taking care of the patients with these kinds of diseases and health
conditions, it has been operational for more than 50 years now since it was started back in
1960. The hospital has evolved from offering just care services to offering additional services
like surgical operations especially for the children with chronic diseases like diabetes, cancer
and heart diseases. The hospital has developed and improved since it was started. For
instance, its employee numbers has increased year after year and currently having around
2000 employees, including the doctors, nurses and other workers.

Mission Statement
The hospital’s mission is to provide quality and efficient healthcare services and healing
environment by availing effective healthcare facilities to the community children and their
families with the believe that each one of them is bound to have good health condition to
promote and achieve community development and growth.
Vision Statement
To be the leading healthcare service and healthcare program providers in the region,
meeting not only the children but also the other community members and taking care of
their health care needs with effectiveness and generosity.
2. Describe the change you hope to implement:
What is the current situation?
CHANGE IMPLEMENTATION
The patient safety was identified as of the main aims and purposes of quality healthcare
management that interrelate directly with high quality healthcare service in a healthcare
institution.
Patient safety basically refers to the prevention of unwanted situations or accidents that may
take place when treating a patient (Hofoss and Deilkås, 2008). The main purpose for
encouraging patient safety standards, is to reduce the consequences that come in handy if
patient safety is not exercised, e.g. deaths, failure to recover etc. patient safety is one of the
main aspects that a health institution should focus on and ensure that it exists and is a
priority(Brown, 2016). Health care industry is often considered to be a high risk industry
simply because of the morbidity and mortality aspects that are involved with it. According to
Elder et al, 2007, patient safety culture of any hospital play a main role to ensuring patient
safety. Therefore, in order to reduce these risks, the industry should always evaluate and
analyse the safety culture of the organization especially among the employees to ensure
patient safety is strong and efficient (Feng et al, 2008& Bishop and Boyle, 2016).
Recently, the patient flow has decreased due to the decline in effective and efficient patient
care culture. This has been as a result of ineffective management culture, poor employee
management, outdated technological advancement and poor patient management in general.

A patient safety survey has proved these are the attributors of the declining patient safety
culture, which has currently dropped by 20, 000 patients per year. To be precise, the hospital
currently is often involved in medication errors caused by ineffective patient examination,
encourage fast needed operations leading to surgical complications, nurses diagnose patients,
often uses handoff communication method and lack of interoperability among other things.
Therefore, it is important that this kind of culture is changed or improved for the better.
Desired Situation
Patient safety is one of the most addressed and crucial aspect of a healthcare institution.
Safety culture survey and research has become one of the most commonly used tools to
evaluate and analyse a hospital’s performance when it comes to patient safety. Therefore, in
this case, besides focusing on promoting patient safety culture through improvising new
strategies or improving the already existing methods on safety culture, the project will also:
improve the communication process and structure in the hospital, increase the knowledge and
skills of the employee in relation to patient safety, introduce new modern and improved
technology to use to support patient safety and improve the service quality which will
increase patient flow and recovery rates among other things.
Process of Achievement
The project will concentrate only on improving or changing the strategies and methods being
used currently by the hospitals to effect patient safety and the cultural practices. This will be
achieved by increasing the staff accountability standards, increasing the quality standards of
their roles and responsibilities in general, implementing modern technological appliances and
machines, increasing the management standards of the management team and improving the
overall techniques used to offer patient safety in the hospital. The strategies to be used in
achieving these specific methods will include: conducting training and carrying out education
conferences every month to equip the nurses, doctors and other employee with more
knowledge on patient safety, raising the rates for which every employee must reach in order
for them to be reach during their performance appraisal examinations of every year, installing
of the modern technological equipment as well as training the employees on how to use them
and lastly hiring more qualified and skilled managers as well as training the existing hospital
management team to improve their management techniques and methods. By implementing
these aspects, the hospital will be in a position to transform the patient safety culture by
simply increasing the standards of every service and action being carried out at every
moment.

The stakeholders of the project include the hospital’s management team, the government, the
employees, the patients and other associations whose responsibility is to support and protect
children in the country.
Project Aim
Introduce safety culture management process
What are your 3-5 SMART Objectives?
1. In order to increase the staff’s knowledge and skills of hospital’s safety culture
assessment to 96% by end of 2018.
2. In order to improve the hospital’s safety management effectiveness which relates to
patient safety culture to 50% by the end of 2018.
3. In order to increase the safety healthcare service practice to 95% by end of 2018.
4. In order to promote management effectiveness to 90% by the end of 2018.
Why is this change needed?
Please give evidence for your decision and include as an appendix any tools you used to
help you in this analysis.
The study of Albejaidi, 2010) claimed that most hospitals have been facing significantly
challenges to provide the quality of healthcare in dealing with demands of increasing
numbers of chronic illness patient that caused from demographic factors of aging, social
environment, life style and eating behaviour (Rappaport, 2016) and shortages of bed and
labour in year 1970-2009 in Saudi Arabia region (Almutairi & Moussa, 2014).
In order to overwhelm the challenges, the reform of government of Saudi Arabia focuses on
improving the quality of the health care services through implementing safety systems and
developing safety culture in the region as the vision 2030 of national development document
issued. (Epstein, 2014).
Because of this increase in health care services several challenges are now facing the
organizations dealing in the health care and their staff as well. However there are some
significant aspects that support this kind of change for the healthcare institutions, eg the
Saudi Arabian Government, technology advancement (helps implement patient safety
systems), adverse and effective hospital, employee and patient management methods and
desire to improve performance in terms of patient safety culture. In addition to that, the
involvement of these parties show the need for teamwork and the need for the change itself.
On the other hand, lack of enough funds, enough government support and lack of skills and

knowledge to utilize the new technology are some of the challenges affecting this course of
change.
4. Discuss the impactyou hope the change will have upon your organisation and describe
the expected outcome(s).
Improve the patient safety culture standards
This is one of the main objectives of the change itself and will be certainly a long term
impact. The change will device new strategies and methods or developing and improving the
already existing strategies and methods. When the change is completed, the hospital will be
able to improve its operations that relate to patient safety like implementation and usage of
safety systems (e.g. the use of blood transfusion machines to reduce spread of transmittable
diseases) and provision of quality care (e.g. implementation of effective medication safety
practices).By doing this, the hospital will be exercising its role and responsibility in ensuring
patient safety.
Increase hospital’s management performance in the way of patient throughput
This impact is also a long term impact and is in relation to the desire of the hospital to
improve its performance. Patient throughput refers to the total number of patients served in a
health institutions. This change implementation will cause an increase or maximization of the
hospital’s patient throughput because when the patient’s relatives realize that their children
are being provided the best care and that the hospital has implemented the strong, effective
and direct safety standards in their operations, they are likely to visit the hospital often. The
change will certainly affect the hospital’s chance and level of patient attraction.
Service quality improvement
Generally, when the patient safety standards improve and care increases, the hospital will
focus on improving its service quality to keep the patient flow higher. This change will
certainly increase the quality of hospital services which will later lead to high patient
attraction and maintenance rate (Holloway and Galvin, 2016).
Increase organization’s competitive advantage
The better the patient safety culture in a hospital, the better the competitive advantage. Since
patient safety culture can be used to indicate the quality of services offered in a hospital, the
number of employees operation there, the technology development of the hospital and
effectiveness of the strategies and systems used in the hospital operations among other things,
this kind of change implementation will be able to achieve all of above.

5. Discuss the potential threats or obstacles you may face when implementing this
change.How might you overcome these threats?
When it comes to implementing the project, the following challenges and solutions may be
involved:
 Lack of enough employees or practitioners to work in the hospital to implement the
changes mitigated by ensuring enough and availability of employee before the project
is commenced.
 Inadequacy of experts and experienced project managers especially in the health
sector industry with knowledge and skills to effect the intended change and leadership
role during the implementation that can be solved by ensuring that all the project team
members are experienced, skilled and knowledgeable in the specific field.
 Inadequate government support solved by notifying and asking for government
support earlier.
 Use of outdated technology in most of the hospital’s operations solved by always
upgrading the hospitals technological use.
 Inadequate staff engagement, support and participation that can be mitigated by
ensuring that the already existing staff are aware and support the project
implementation.
6. Outline your proposed method(s) of evaluating this change.
How will you demonstrate that you have achieved your SMART Objectivesstated in
Section 2 above?
The project will be evaluated by the hospital’s top management team which will include of
the top skilled and experienced practitioners that specialize on chronic diseases affecting
children. The team will focus on the project’s ability to achieve its objectives, mentioned
earlier. The evaluation will be determined by the ability of the change to achieve the
objectives intended, hence making the objectives the tools for measurement of performance
which will be determined by every project members’ attitude, skill and knowledge besides
overall teamwork effort being given to the project’s success. Also, it will focus on ensuring
that the strategies and methods used are either formulated or changed or that they are
completely different from those used earlier. They will simply be evaluating the change’s
failures and success rates by accessing its ability and capability of achieving its objectives
and purposes in general. It should therefore be able to increase and improve the patient safety
culture in the hospital hence making the patients more comfortable.
No. KPIs Measurement tools
1 Increase the feedback of incident report to 100% Internal Auditing

2 Increase hospital’s safety culture to 90% Safety culture survey
3 Increase the staff’s awareness and skills of safety practice to 90% Pre-after test
4 Increase the staff’s satisfaction of safety management to 90% Satisfaction Questionnaire
5 Increase the staff’s compliance of incident report protocol to 90% Internal Auditing
6 Reduce the rate of mortality cause from advent events to xxxx% (the
percentage as your aim for but reasonable)
Hospital’s administrative
database
7 Reduce the rate of advert event to 4% ( Your’ d better to identify the
classification of advent event if you would like to)
Hospital’s administrative
database
8 Reduce the rate of morbidity cause from advent event and medical errors to
xxx%(the percentage as your aim for but reasonable)
Hospital’s administrative
database
9 Increase the quality standards of the services offered to 96%
10 Increase the accountability rates for the actions taken by the hospital’s staff
7. Describe your role in your organisation.
As a member of the patient safety and patient management department in the hospital, my
role and responsibility was to research and investigate the current cultural practices of the
hospital and the required cultural practices for any healthcare institution. The results will be
used to provide evidence and research on the standards and measures expected from any
health institution in the country especially in relation to patient safety cultural practices in this
particular hospital. I am also expected to provide the best, modern and most effective and
efficient strategies to implement the change itself.
As the project members’ leader, my role is to manage and supervise every project member to
ensure that they have performed their duties on time. I am also expected to account for every
team member as well as their performance levels.
8. Include an appendix with the expected main phases of work and timelines (mini Gantt
chart). See template available on the VLE.
If you are intending to undertake a Full Implementation approach to your project, please
include relevant timescales for achieving ethical approval in your chart.
Mini Gantt chart should be carried out accordance with the John’s feedback
9. What literature is there available related to your chosen topic?
Please list 4 to 7 references to demonstrate you have conducted an initial literature
search. (As you provided in latest proposal)
10. If you are intending to undertake a Full Implementation of your project please indicate
how you will achieve the requirementsof the RCSI Ethics Committee.
AS you prior work of draft proposal