In February 2012, the PICU Task Force was officially established with the aim to take forward work produced by the 90-day Task Force. The overall goal was to monitor the transformation of care within PICU and to establish future priorities that will position PICU as a model of excellence within Hamad Medical Corporation and the Middle East.
The task force is chaired by Dr. Khalid Bshesh, Director of PICU, and committee members include well-established healthcare professionals from multi-disciplinary areas, such as respiratory therapy, nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy and dietetics. Areas of focus for the task force include Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), education and training, neurosurgical trauma and establishment of a Pediatric Rapid Response Team.
The first meeting was held in February 2012 and eleven meetings have taken place since then, several PICU Task Force priorities have progressed with great speed. The PICU terms of reference (TOR) were agreed and existing implementation plans from the 90-day PICU Task Force have been reviewed, accepted and are ready for implementation. The task force has worked with Dr. Desmond Bohn, Director of PICU-SickKids, and together, they have identified a number of important priorities for PICU to focus on during 2012.
By December 2012 all PICU nursing staff will have completed the subspecialty education curricula and leadership development workshops delivered by SKI. These include respiratory therapy education, which will be delivered in the form of ventilation management, lung pathophysiology and advanced continuing education. There will be an official launch of the Pediatric Rapid Response Team and a phased implementation of continuous renal replacement therapy is underway. Also, PICU hopes to implement a well-established model of care within a family-centered multi-disciplinary framework, where progress is measured through the half-year evaluation comparison of baseline data using KPIs.
The successes and achievements already made in such a short period of time have enabled the task force to continue in its efforts to progress with the improvement and development of the PICU. Committee members are confident to continue to mould PICU at HMC into the model of excellence it has the potential to be.
