Bumrungrad aims for Thailand quality award

The hospital this year won the Thailand Quality Class 2008 (TQC) from the Thailand Productivity Institute. The TQA, which requires higher scores, would further boost the confidence of local and foreign patients in the hospital, CEO Mack Banner said.

Winning the TQC award was the first step for the hospital in preparing itself for the TQA, Banner said. As company leader, he said he has tried to communicate with staff through every channel in a bid to make them understand the hospital's goals and the importance of winning the award.

Apichati Sivayathorn, chief quality officer at Bumrungrad Hospital, said the firm's top priority was getting the staff to share a common understanding of the hospital's direction. If its employees, comprising approximately 1,000 physicians and 4,000 nurses, have a harmonious understanding of the corporate direction, they will be able to offer medical services of the same standard to patients from many different nations, Apichati said.

This is the main requirement for winning the TQA, the quality officer said. TQA is the global standard for corporate management.

It covers many aspects, including organisational leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, knowledge analysis and management, personnel management, process management and tangible business results. Rayong Gas Separation Plant PTT is the only Thai corporation to have won the award.  To improve services and achieve higher scores, Bumrungrad is gathering feedback from patients. Every Bumrungrad department will do customer surveys in a bid to obtain this feedback. The management team will review the surveys monthly.

In order to improve services, international benchmarking is necessary, Apichati said. Consulting firms have been hired to help gather data for comparison.

"Medical services are unlike other products that consumers can evaluate with their eyes. International standards increase patients' trust in the hospital's medical services, even if they have never come to the hospital. Nearly 50 per cent of our patients are foreigners. When they come to Thailand, they will think of us as a place with international standards," the quality officer said.

Smoothing the hospital's operations is its information technology system, which helps deliver services to the approximately 3,200 patients who come to the hospital each day, said Banner.

Meanwhile, the installation of a robot-based pharmaceutical distribution system at the hospital's inpatient department in April last year has helped reduce errors in medicine distribution by 70-80 per cent from manual operations. At present, the system provides 100-per-cent accuracy in medicine distribution for the hospital's inpatients.

Bumrungrad was the first Thai hospital awarded Hospital Accreditation (HA) and the first in Asia to win Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation.

"Several criteria for HA, JCI and TQC overlap, but TQC covers the most areas of operation. As we improve our management system to comply with the standard, we have been analysing our weaknesses as shown in the [efforts to achieve the] other awards," Banner said.