Health Minister Dr. Abdullah Al-Rabeeah will lead a six-member delegation to the 65th session of the World Health Assembly which begins in Geneva from Monday, the Ministry of Health announced in Riyadh yesterday.

MOH spokesman Dr. Khalid Al-Mirghalani told Arab News that the health assembly is slated to discuss a number of public health issues such as universal health coverage, Millennium Development Goals, noncommunicable diseases, mental disorders, nutrition and adolescent pregnancy and chalk out a plan of action for the prevention of blindness and visual impairment.

The six-day Health Assembly will also discuss the program budget, administration and management matters of the WHO.

The nomination of Dr. Margaret Chan as WHO director-general for a second term will be submitted for approval.

Chan was first appointed in November 2006. Before being elected director-general, Chan was WHO assistant director-general for communicable diseases as well as representative of the director-general for pandemic influenza.

Other papers that will be presented during the sessions of the assembly would include maternal nutrition, infant and young child nutrition, nutrition of women in the preconception period, during pregnancy and the breast-feeding period, early marriages, adolescent and young pregnancies and implementation of the International Health Regulations (2005).

Others in the minister's team include Deputy Health Minister for Planning Dr. Mansour Al-Hawasi, Undersecretary to the Ministry of Health for Public Health Dr. Ziad Al-Memish, Undersecretary to the Ministry of Health for Medical Affairs Dr. Muneera Al-Osaimi, General Supervisor for International Relations Afaf Al-Shammary, General Supervisor for Disease Control Dr. Mohamed Al-Saeedi and Mirghalani.

Meanwhile, Director of MOH Clinical Information Systems Dr. Abdulrahman Al-Bawardi affirmed yesterday that the ministry is eager to improve the quality of health services provided to patients.

“In this spirit, a number of e-systems have been recently launched. They are intended to follow up beneficiaries' information quickly and efficiently,” he said.

In a press statement issued yesterday, Al-Bawardi pointed out that one of these systems is the Critical Errors Reporting Program (CERP), which makes use of the services offered by the MOH portal.

This program, he said, enables the ministry to record all critical errors that occur in public and private hospitals, in addition to information on each hospital and its director.

Al-Bawardi said a critical error has been defined by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) as an unexpected error leading up to the patient's death, or serious bodily or mental harm usually unrelated to the normal path of the disease.

The program will help provide a root cause analysis for such errors, and develop preventive techniques meant to reduce or prevent the recurrence of such errors and their triggers.

When a critical error takes place, he pointed, the hospital's authorized system user instantly records it. Immediately following that, a SMS is sent to MOH senior officials, identifying the error, its date and place. Consequently, proper measures are taken by contacting the hospital and obtaining the necessary information in addition to demanding the root cause analysis of the error.

Al-Bawardi made it clear that punitive actions will be taken against any hospital in case they fail to record critical errors or conduct root cause analyses.

“With the implementation of the program, we're looking forward to realizing the program's ultimate objective, which is the improvement of health services provided for the citizens,” he stressed.

Concluding his statement, Al-Bawardi pointed out that the Critical Errors Reporting Program comes within the framework of the MOH's strategy to offer infallible health care services to the public.

Under the program, the ministry has harnessed highly qualified and proficient human resources (physicians, nurses and technicians), as well as state-of-the-art medical equipment to provide high-quality diagnostic, curative and preventive services.