KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 17 — A 22-year-old international healthcare forum will be held next week in Malaysia for the first time to discuss quality and safety issues.
The International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare, jointly organised by non-profit groups the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and the US' Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), supported by the Academy of Medicine of Malaysia and the Malaysian Society for Quality in Health (MSQH), will run from next Thursday to Saturday at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre.
"According to the World Health Organisation, the chances of experiencing harm in healthcare is 1 in 300 and the chances of getting harmed in hospital is 1 in 10," Dr Milton Lum, co-chair of the programme advisory committee, told a press conference here today.
He said there were no statistics specific to Malaysia, but that they should be not much different from international figures.
"There are keynote sessions by world renowned leaders in patient safety and quality i.e. Donald Berwick, former administrator of the Centres for Medicare & Medicaid Services Centres for Medicare of the United States and chief executive officer of IHI; Tan Sri Abu Bakar Suleiman, chairman of IHH Healthcare Bhd and former director-general of Health; Derek Feeley, current CEO of IHI; Azran Osman Rani, CEO of iFlix Malaysia and former CEO of AirAsia X; and William Tan, neuroscientist, medical doctor and Paralympian," he said.
Issues of quality and safety in healthcare in Malaysia and around the world include errors in prescribing medicine, infections acquired from hospitals, patient falls in hospitals, among others, said Dr Lum.
