Joint Commission International (JCI) Accredited Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai highlights the importance of quality of care in a healthcare setting

Healthcare providers have a moral and professional responsibility to ensure that the care they provide to patients is safe and delivers results in line with internationally recognised outcomes.

As the first overseas branch of Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai continuously strives to maintain and further grow the positive reputation of its 200+ year-old parent hospital. A core priority for the hospital, and one of the ways of achieving this, is through frequent, quantifiable audits related to the quality of care provided.

The quality ambition of the hospital includes measurable targets for their patients, embodied by safe care, positive experiences, involvement, and, very importantly, outstanding surgical outcomes.

Surgical outcome measures monitor the safety and success of surgeries performed in a quantifiable way. This helps to ensure that the quality of care can be robustly measured and comparisons assessed from patient to patient, surgeon to surgeon and clinic to clinic.

The hospital has a vast range of vigorously monitored surgical outcome measures, covering services including cataracts, retinal detachments, paediatrics, strabismus, refractive eye surgery, ocular plastics, corneal transplants, and glaucoma. In addition, the hospital measures aspects such as vision after surgery, the occurrence of infection and the rate of requiring further surgery.

The data gathered is fed back to the parent hospital to ensure that clinical outcomes are in line with international guidelines and benchmarks.

An example of the above is cataract surgery outcomes, where over 98% of Moorfields patients in the UAE had a post-operative visual acuity better than 6/12, exceeding the target of 90% set.

Another instance is the hospital’s 98% success rate for retinal detachment surgery, far exceeding the 75% target for the highly complex surgery.

LASIK surgery and similar vision correction surgery targets of 80% and over were also surpassed, with over 95% success rate reported.

Accountability for outcomes is an aspect in which the London branch in Dubai takes much pride. The detailed surgical outcomes measured are not only communicated organisation-wide in Dubai and London but also to the patients; this helps relieve anxiety often associated with the decision to undergo a surgical procedure.

The hospital aims to publish such outcome data and urges all other healthcare providers to do the same, as such transparency is a patient right and a way of empowering patients to make the most informed choice about their healthcare needs.