When I was in my first week of training as a paediatrician in the role of paediatric registrar, a young doctor, a house officer, was in the assessment area for children with gastroenteritis. He assessed a baby who was 10% dehydrated and acidotic. He asked a nurse for 5mls of Sodium Chloride (NCl). The nurse drew up the NCl and handed to the doctor who injected the medication into the intravenous line. The baby had a cardiac arrest and died a few hours later.

A delegation consisting of myself, Cliff Hughes Immediate Past President, Stephen Clark Chair of the IEEA Accreditation Council and Elaine O’ Connor Head of the International Accreditation Programme and Strategic Partnerships will attend and present at the Conference on International Hospital Accreditation – Key to Quality and Safety from the 18^th – 20^th of February in Shenzhen, China.

We are now reaching a critical stage in the delivery of healthcare. Patient Safety is now a central component of the delivery of healthcare – and we now need to set ambitious goals to eliminate harm. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Worldwide initiatives have had variable success mainly because it is difficult to achieve standardisation without a change in the way we work. Patient safety needs to become a social movement where there is a groundswell of change and eventually safety becomes the way we do work.

We are now over half way through the year and moving closer and closer to our annual Conference in Kuala Lumpur in September.

I have been doing a lot of travel to Africa recently, on behalf of ISQua. During February I visited Ghana, South Africa and Mozambique, before returning to Dublin for the bi-annual ISQua Board face-to-face meeting and retreat.

I would firstly like to wish each of you a very happy new year and wish you the best for the coming year. We achieved a lot in 2017 and plan to build on these achievements in 2018.

It has been a very productive year for ISQua with the consolidation of what we do and the growth of new areas of activities. During the year we have aimed to implement our strategy to be the leading international organisation in the field of quality and safety.

 

As we approach the Board elections I thought that I would review the key roles of members in ISQua. Members are the core of the society, which aims to bring together like-minded individuals and organisations to transform healthcare for the better.

At this time of the year, we are looking forward to the conference in a 3 months’ time and to the election of the new Board.