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.

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