MD's message to staff on New Year

The main reason for this gathering is to meet you all and express my gratitude to you all. I take this opportunity to wish everybody a very Happy New Year.

As you know we run a huge operation here at the hospital and as I stand here today, the hospital has a staff strength of 750. ADK Hospital is continuously growing, expanding, improving and upgrading the services we deliver. 

No matter how much effort the management puts into achieve these things, or no matter how much we invest, without our dedicated and enthusiastic group of people who deliver every single day, we would not be able to achieve what we are achieving today. So as I said at the very beginning, I wanted to meet all of you and humbly thank you all from the bottom of my heart. I acknowledge the work that you do to make sure that the people of this country get the best of services that they come to seek from us. 

This year, we focused a lot to improve quality of services. All our professional staffs have been asked to take the online course on quality and safety offered by the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, Australia. We also made a policy that it’s mandatory for all the new professional staff who join ADK Hospital to complete this course within the first 3 months of joining in order to successfully complete their probation. I believe that it is very important that we make it a norm to learn and upgrade our knowledge.  

We have embarked on the journey of accredited this year. We are working to make ADK Hospital to become the first internationally accredited Hospital in Maldives. A lot of ground work has been done for the NABH Certification. All the accreditation work will be completed soon and I am pretty sure that early 2018, we will achieve this target of becoming an internationally accredited hospital. It is very important for us to do that because, it, in fact gains the confidence of the people. It also is a statement that this intuition is committed for quality of care. 

We also brought a major transformation to the whole nursing services.  We took a very bold decision to transform, re-structure and introduce new areas of expertise to the nursing framework that, in the past no intuitions in the Maldives has done. I am very happy to say that because of these changes very prominent and good nurses with many years of experience, who were working here at ADK Hospital and some from other institutions were able to get advancement in their careers. They got the opportunity to face new challenges and to take new steps in their career.

We also looked at improving and introducing new services to our hospital. Today we have 8 super specialties in our hospital. No other healthcare provider in this county have this amount of super specialties available in their institutions. A lot of Maldivians come to seek these services in this hospital. 

This year marks the largest number of Maldivian clinicians working in this institute. I am very happy that more and more Maldivian clinicians are approaching us for jobs and are showing interest to work in this hospital. I am sure many more good and committed Maldivian clinicians will join our hospital.  One of the biggest challenges that I had faced in my tenure here was attracting Maldivian clinicians. With a lot of work, lots of persuasion, lots of marketing we are slowly being able to make prominent, and also new and verging physicians and clinicians to be coming in here. I am also proud that more Maldivian professionals are interested to work in other areas in this hospital as well. 

I am also proud that as this year ends, we have 14 professionals, doctors, nurses and other allied health related personnel, who are being trained with our funding. We hope to continue these trainings and scholarships throughout the coming years. 

I would like to note that since November this year, the new Continuous Medical Education and Continuous Professional Education policy has come into effect. Over the next few months our HR Department will be circulating and facilitating all areas of professional staff to get their CMEs or CPEs started. The Quality and Safety course I mentioned at the beginning, counts for the national and international CPE points as well. So it is very important that we all do that. 

In a nutshell, we focused a lot in 2017, on quality of care and safety of patients as well as staff who provide the services. 

This year, we saw a flu epidemic in the country and a lot of work was done by this organization as corporate social responsibility during the epidemic. In fact, we spent around 3.2 million Maldivian Rufiyaa for flue relief as part of our social responsibility. 

 So, that highlighted some of the works we have done this year to achieve our targets. Once again I would like to say that we would not have been able to achieve so much without our committed and hardworking staff.  So again, I would thank all of you for your continued commitment. We do acknowledge the work you put in.

I am happy to tell you that tonight (midnight) we will be opening 20 additional beds in this hospital. Right now there is a queue of people waiting to get admitted. So hopefully tonight we will be admitting the patients in our new ward, ward 6 and ward 7 the day after. This means we will be starting our services from the new wing. We are hoping to officially inaugurate the new wing early  January 2018. 

In addition to that, next year will be very exciting for us. We are now gearing to do open heart surgery, first in the country. We hope that by end of February 2018, we will be ready to conduct open heart surgery in Maldives for the first time. We have a plan that by middle of this coming year we will develop the capacity to do organ transplantation in this hospital as well. That is a big aim we have. All these aims and dreams that we have had, we have been achieving steadily. I hope that with your commitment, we will achieve these dreams as well by working together as a team. 

We hope to open the new theater complex by end of February 2018. It would include three state of the art operation theaters; a beach, a sunset and an underwater. We will also be opening theCardiac Catheterization Laboratory (CathLab), which would become the most advanced CathLab in the country. It would be up to mark with such Labs within the region of South Asia and South East Asia. We will be advancing a lot to provide these services for the people of this country at their doorsteps. 

The other good news is that our labour room will become bigger. We have started work on it.  Next year we will get two dedicated theaters for obstetrics and gynecology and also a bigger NICU. 

Next year will also embark on something that have been struggling; teaching and research.  Research is something that is lacking through the country. This year we have not been able to kick start on these. Right now we have the Emergency Medical Technician course accredited by Maldivian Qualification Authority and also approved by the Allied Health Council. Our nursing curriculum is currently in the process for approval.  We will get nursing council’s inspection somewhere early next year. This means we will have capacity to train 20 nurses in the first year once we get the approval. This would be another big step in our work towards improving our services and building human resources in the country. 

Once again, we do really appreciate the work you are putting in this organization. Every single one of you work really very hard every day to ensure that our vision and mission are met.  That’s what makes us, as a management happy. We hope that your enthusiasm, commitment and delivery will continue. Thank you very much. Please be assured that the management is open to you views. We will always try to do our best for the common good, development of this institute and our staff. 

Wish you all a very happy new year and thank you very much.