Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City - SSMC

There are moments in one's professional life that transcend the operational and enter the deeply human moments where the measure of service is not efficiency, but compassion; not protocol, but presence. I am honoured to have been recognised with the Witnessing Outstanding Work (WOW) Award for Culture of Ownership at Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City SSMC, for an act that I consider not exceptional, but essential the act of ensuring that a colleague, far from home and without family in the country, did not face a moment of crisis alone. Liloo Alim a distinguished hospitality professional from Four Seasons masters, who had joined SSMC on a three-month learning engagement to experience the institution's operational culture firsthand found herself in a position of considerable vulnerability, The response was instinctive: to reach out immediately, not once but continuously throughout the journey with us, to assure her that she was not alone, that she was safe, and that she was looked after. This is the essence of what it means to serve within an institution like SSMC. Protective services is not confined to the perimeter of a facility or the parameters of a duty roster. It extends to the human dimension to the wellbeing, the dignity, and the peace of mind of every individual within the institution's care. My sincere gratitude to Liloo Alim for this nomination that you chose to honour this act of care with a formal recognition speaks to the grace and generosity that define your own character. Girish U Sehgal , Chief Patient Experience Officer, for endorsing this recognition your leadership consistently affirms that the highest form of institutional excellence is not procedural, it is personal. And to Dr. Marwan Alkaabi, Chief Executive Officer, for fostering a culture where compassion is not a footnote to operations, but its very foundation. To serve where humanity is honoured alongside duty is the truest privilege of this profession. #WOW #CultureOfOwnership #PatientExperience #CompassionInService #OperationalExcellence #SSMC #PureHealth #HealthcareSecurity #InstitutionalLeadership #ProtectiveServices #HumanDignity #UAE #AbuDhabi #Stewardship #ServiceExcellence #ColleagueCare

Honored to stand with a team that continues to set the standard for infection control. #Wordclassteam ! Joselita Rego BSC,RN,CIC®, CPHQ® ,MBA in Healthcare Management Sheena Kabeer RN,CIC,CPHQ Doa'a Ibrahim Wilmalyn Rebuyas, RN-ICN, CIC, AL-CIP Anumol

An excellent and highly relevant study exploring oncology patients’ willingness and perspectives on participation in clinical trials—an essential step toward enhancing patient engagement and advancing evidence-based cancer care. Special appreciation to Dr. Aydah AlAwadhi for her continuous and outstanding support of clinical research at SSMC. Her leadership, along with the proactive efforts of the hematology-oncology department, plays a key role in driving forward clinical trials and research excellence.

Emergency departments are pressure indicators, not the problem When one department is congested, the cause is often sitting somewhere else in the system. That is why ED crowding is rarely just an emergency department problem. It is where failures in access, inpatient flow, diagnostics, bed management, discharge, and coordination become impossible to ignore. Patients do not arrive in equal patterns across the day, and many come to the ED because access has failed somewhere else. Some need true emergency care. Others arrive because primary care was not available, follow-up was too slow, or the system gave them no easier route to the right clinician. Pressure builds fastest in the one part of the hospital that cannot turn people away. What makes this harder is that congestion does not only come from who walks in. It also comes from who cannot move on. Delays in triage, diagnostics, specialist review, admission decisions, bed assignment, transport, and inpatient transfer all add time. A patient may already have been assessed and accepted for admission, but still remain in an ED bed because the next step is not ready. That is when the real picture becomes clear. A crowded ED often reflects blocked inpatient beds, slow discharge processes, poor visibility of bed status, delayed turnaround, and weak coordination across departments. Fixing the ED locally without changing those conditions usually means asking one department to absorb pressure created by the rest of the hospital. The stronger approach is to treat ED performance as a flow indicator, not a standalone target. That means reviewing demand patterns, strengthening fast-track pathways for lower-acuity patients, reducing diagnostic turnaround, accelerating decision-to-bed transfer, and building reliable follow-up routes so patients do not keep returning to the ED when their condition could have been managed earlier. Emergency departments do not create most of this pressure. They reveal it. Do you agree, or do you see it differently?

Length of stay is often treated as a clinical number, even when part of it is being shaped by operational delay. By the time a patient is close to discharge, the remaining time in hospital is not always about diagnosis or acuity. It is often about everything around the decision. Notes are completed late. Medications are not ready. Rounds happen too far into the day. Transport is not arranged. One team is waiting on another. The patient may be clinically ready for discharge, but the system around that decision is still catching up. That matters more than many organizations realize. A few avoidable hours may not look significant in one admission but repeated across enough patients they become real capacity. Remove just 5 unnecessary hours per patient across 1,000 admissions, and that is the equivalent of more than 200 bed-days returned to the system. This is why length of stay is often a clinical number with an operational story underneath it. The point is not to push patients out faster. It is to stop adding time that no longer serves a clinical purpose. That is where operations has real influence, not by interfering with treatment, but by making discharge readiness, coordination, pharmacy turnaround, transport planning, and bed turnaround work with less friction. Hospitals do not improve length of stay only by treating patients well. They improve it by making sure the system is ready when the patient is. Do you agree, or do you see it differently?