Awareness-raising workshop on quality and safety in health care (2009)

The awareness raising workshop on quality and safety in health care aimed to respond to the expressed interest of national health authorities and efforts already undertaken towards developing a quality and safety strategy in Turkmenistan. Emphasis was placed on the complex issues to be addressed in translating quality and safety integrated approaches into practice, within the framework of heath system strengthening.

Three key entry points were used to emphasize the need for integrated interventions and promoting a systems approach:

• quality and safety principles, strategic steps, measurement
• quality and safety of health care (focus on prevention of nosocomial infections)
• patient safety.

The main objectives of the workshop were:

• to raise awareness towards the need to strengthen the quality and safety of health care services using health system’s perspective, and introduce various measurement tools and indicators to assess and monitor the process of improvement;
• to record progress achieved by different national initiatives, and enhance implementation of WHO and international recommendations for prevention of nosocomial infections, including maternal and neonatal care, blood safety, injection safety, waste management;
• to provide a common platform for discussion, shared experience and information exchange between the multiple stakeholders involved, and commonly define next steps in the process of strengthening quality of care and patient safety in the local context.