RIYADH, 18 September 2006 — Doctors coming to the Kingdom in future will be put through a screening test to ensure that they are professionally qualified.
“Such a requirement has become imperative to curtail the growing incidence of medical errors,” Health Minister Dr. Hamad Al-Manie told delegates on Saturday while inaugurating a three-day International Summit for Patient Safety and Medical Errors (ISPSME).
The minister said plans are under way to establish a national body to ascertain the qualifications of the medics who come to the Kingdom for employment. Dr. Al-Manie said that no country was safe from medical errors. However, “it is the responsibility of the respective countries to prepare their national strategy in combating this problem.” He pointed out that the United Kingdom is spending more than one billion pounds to fight this problem.
There is a Royal Decree empowering the Health Ministry to evaluate the medical professionals who come here for placements in hospitals and clinics to provide quality health care in the Kingdom. Dr. Al-Manie pointed out that medical errors are mainly due to misdiagnosis, misuse of medical apparatus and deviation from standard medical procedures.
Enumerating medical errors reported in Riyadh during 2004, Dr. Khalil Qiyyam, a consultant at the General Directorate for Quality Assurance at the Ministry of Health, said 27 percent were from obstetrics/gynecology, followed by surgical errors (24 percent).
“Therapeutic and diagnostic errors were 19 percent. Around 52 percent of these medical errors were fatal and catastrophic with permanent loss of functions not related to the natural course of patient’s illness,” Dr. Qiyyam added.
While presenting a paper on the World Health Organization’s regional efforts to enhance patient safety in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMRO), WHO Regional Director Dr. Hussein Gezairy said that EMRO was drawing up a framework to bring the benefits of the patient safety initiative to all member states.
Dr. Tawfiq Khoja, director general of the Executive Board of the Council of GCC Health Ministers, said that an alarming trend had arisen in the medical field all over the world. “This trend is represented by medical errors and the increased number of fatalities caused by such errors.”
He said that the executive office had worked out a scheme through which the GCC countries could share their experiences to minimize the cases of medical errors in the region.
The percentage of mortality cases per year due to medical errors is greater than breast cancer or AIDS. The global cost of treating patients injured as a result of medical errors is about $4.5 billion a year.
Prescription error kills over 7,000 people in the US per year where most physicians overlook drug interactions between prescription drugs. Clinical studies indicated that 47 percent of patients received prescriptions with adverse interactions during their hospital visits.
Dr. Samira Ali, research coordinator of the Oncology Department at the King Abdul Aziz Medical City, said studies in the United States revealed that 56 percent of medical errors occur during the drug ordering process, 34 percent during administration, six percent during transcription and four percent occur during dispensing process.
