Rating system would improve healthcare

The UAE needs a federal system ranking its hospitals to increase healthcare standards

The UAE needs a federal system ranking its hospitals to increase healthcare standards. (Antonie Robertson / The National )

One of the few downsides of the UAE’s rapidly expanding health care sector is that patients sometimes face a bewildering choice about the most appropriate hospital to receive medical care. The lack of widely available information about the safety and quality of these hospitals has led to a situation where patients often rely on word of mouth recommendations when seeking medical treatment inside the country.

As The National reported yesterday, the health care sector in the Northern Emirates is influenced by people's perceptions on the overall quality of the medical care provided there. At times, the developing nature of the services has led to a lack of trust, pushing many people to travel to Abu Dhabi or Dubai – and even abroad – to get what is perceived as superior treatment.

This means that newly-opened hospitals in the Northern Emirates, including Sheikh Khalifa General Hospital in Umm Al Quwain and Sheikh Khalifa Specialist Hospital in Ras Al Khaimah, need to make greater efforts to earn the trust of potential patients. This goal will require time, money and effort.

Experience from elsewhere tells us that the most effective way to ensure patients are assessing the quality of the health care on offer is to make each hospital’s track record available. This ambition has been hampered by insufficient transparency when it comes to the quality of health care provided in this country. Many hospitals do not make public details about the safety and quality of their services, including waiting times, infection prevention measures, survival rates after diagnosis, intensive care mortality rates and overall patient experience.

That is about to change. Every hospital in Abu Dhabi is to be quality rated. According to Maha Barakat, director general of the Health Authority Abu Dhabi, the aim of the scheme is for “the public to see first hand who are the providers with the best quality and who are the providers with the weakest quality.”

Such a scheme should be nationwide and should include publicising methodology and national averages, which would have the effect of both raising standards and helping patients make informed decisions. A truly world-class health care sector is more likely to emerge from this reality.