Course Report

Comprehensive Quality Management: Quality Assessment and Improvement - PDF Version

13 – 16 October 2019, Dublin, Republic of Ireland

Course directors

Nicolas Pourel: radiation oncologist, Institut Sainte Catherine, Avignon, France
NĂºria Jornet: medical physicist, Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, Barcelona, Spain

We are part of the team of Augusta Victoria Hospital radiation department in East Jerusalem, Israel. The department was established in 2005 as the only radiation facility serving around five million Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza.

We are Dr Fadi Atrash, head of the department, and Yasser Qasem, chief radiation therapist. We chose to attend this course since we planned to assess and improve the quality of our services in a scientific and evidence based manner.

We considered this course to be beneficial to us after reviewing the programme and proposed content, which was managed and presented by experts in the field of quality improvement and covered many aspects of quality management and auditing, choice and measurement of quality indicators, and lean use of methodology.

The interesting aspect of the course was the use of practical exercises. These eased understanding of the concept and methods that were explained in the very clear lectures. The practical sessions also gave us the opportunity to interact with participants from other countries and backgrounds, and to share experiences, thoughts and visions.

Definitely, the course increased our knowledge of quality management in radiation therapy and broadened our vision of ways in which we could continue to implement scientifically the concepts of quality auditing in our department. Our department has passed the quarto audit and gained Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation.

Certainly we will apply what we have learned by doing the following:

  • First, explain what we learned to the rest of our team during a workshop, to explain to them the main concepts learned during the course and how to apply them in our department at different levels;  
  • Second, we will create groups from the team to apply the lean method to our workflow to see what we can improve. We will choose new quality indicators to monitor during this year, and we will appoint a quality officer to monitor the whole process;
  • Third, after acceptance and initial application of this proposed plan,  we will review it every six months to monitor the effect on quality improvement and make any necessary modifications.

Finally, we look forward to participating in more such courses. We strongly recommend that radiation therapy and quality personnel attend this course to understand on a scientific basis the concept of a comprehensive quality programme, and to assess and improve the quality of their service.

Fadi-Atrash.jpg

Dr. Fadi Atrash
Head radiation oncologist,
Cancer Care Center
Augusta Victoria Hospital
Jerusalem, Israel

Yasser-Qasem.jpg

Mr. Yasser Qasem
Chief radiation therapist
Cancer Care Center
Augusta Victoria Hospital
 Jerusalem, Israel

Atrash-Course-Participants-(4).jpg

Course participants