Basema Roubi is presently Patient Business Services Office Leader at the American Hospital in Dubai – one of the best known and most highly regarded private hospitals in the UAE and GCC region. Here, Basema reflects on her recent participation in IHLM’s Certificate in Healthcare Leadership and Management.
What are you current management challenges?
One of the main challenges we face at the American Hospital, Dubai – and especially in the finance and patient servicing departments – is that patients come to our hospital with extremely high expectations because they are coming to a private hospital that is well known within the UAE and the GCC region. So the challenge for us is to meet patient expectations by serving them in the best way possible.
Have you found this week’s course useful?
During my participation in this course, which I found is very important for professionals and managers who work in the health sector, I think that it is important to take what we have learned from this course and apply it to our everyday processes.
Dr Hesham Souka
After over fifteen years as a consultant general and vascular surgeon in the UK, Dr Hesham Souka has recently been appointed as the Medical Director of Amina Hospital in Ajman, UAE. Part of Anglo-Arabian Healthcare, the hospital was established to provide world-class medical and surgical expertise. Dr Souka participated in IHLM’s Certificate in Healthcare Leadership and Management and shared his thoughts about the course with us.
What are your aims in your new role in the UAE?
What we are trying to establish in Amina Hospital is a hospital in the heart of Ajman that’s run like any western facility in Europe or the United Kingdom, where I came from. That’s my main challenge: to have a hospital with a culture that is different from a lot of the hospitals around it in the area.
How useful have you found this course?
Attending this management course was particularly useful. I would reflect on one of the slides in the course. One of the early slides was talking about learning to become a good manager. You do that through experience – which is reflecting on your own mistakes and your own successes as well; through exposure – which is watching others making mistakes but also taking the right decisions; and the third component is acquiring knowledge. Acquiring knowledge can be through reading a book, but this is the poorest component in your trying to achieve, trying to become a manager. The course itself allowed me to interact with the two educators, and this helped to concentrate the knowledge in a nutshell. It helped me a lot to reflect on the experience and the exposure that I had in the past. So that was great.
What do you think has been the biggest benefit of participating in this course?
As a result of this course my thoughts are a little bit more focused on what I need to achieve in our organisation. So it’s clear in my mind now that the first task is to provide a superb customer service to our patients and I will try to engage my colleagues and get them subscribing to the same idea. If I do that, I’ll call it a success!
Would you recommend this course to colleagues?
I would definitely recommend this course and I would definitely try to find a way for my colleagues to attend the course, or even a smaller version of it if it’s difficult to take the five days off from our busy schedule. But the contents of the course definitely are something that managers would like to share with their managerial team at different levels in the organisation.
Dr Fahad Al Kharashi
Dr Al Kharashi is currently the Director of Medical Affairs at the Royal Commission Health Services Programmein the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Already in a senior role, he wanted to to gain new perspectives and chose to attend IHLM’s Healthcare Mini MBA in Dubai.
What made you choose to enrol in this particular course?
I looked at all the sections that will be discussed in this programme: strategy, leadership, human resources, and lean healthcare. I reviewed it all, and I decided to come to the course. And I am sure that interacting with different mentalities and getting different experience, it will really add much to my development. I know all of this before coming.
What has the atmosphere between course members been like?
The people who I met in the course are very happy. Their level is different and their speciality is different. They are from both medical and non-medical backgrounds, but I believe the interaction between all of us is good.
What is the main lesson that you’ll be taking away from this course?
The programme has challenged me to be more focused on implementing what I believe will improve efficiency.
Mohammad Al Masalha
A lawyer by training, Mohammad Al Masalha recently took on an important role in his family’s private hospital: Al Essra Hospital in Amman, Jordan. When he enrolled onto IHLM’s Healthcare Mini MBA, Mohammad was hoping to gain valuable insights into what makes healthcare enterprises successful. Here he shares some highlights from the course and discusses how he plans to use his learning.
Coming from outside of healthcare, how did you find the course?
I found myself learning a lot from other members of the programme. When I came here I found myself the youngest among them, so I thought that I need to sit with them and learn from each one’s experience – including the instructors, of course. So it was really amazing for me, the diverse backgrounds each one is coming from.
What sort of impact has the course had on you?
I believe that I will be much more influential at Al Essra Hospital, especially because this will be the first training programme that I complete in the field of healthcare services and healthcare management. I also believe that this is only the beginning. I will reflect everything I have learned back onto my organisation where I aim to train our team of healthcare professionals and managers using the knowledge I have gained through this programme.
Would you recommend an IHLM course?
Yes. In the near future I would definitely take another course with IHLM.
