Hearst Health Middle East has been commissioned by the Ministry of Public Health of Qatar (MOPH) to manage the second phase of the National Guidelines Programme. This is an extensive project to develop and update a series of National Guidelines defining appropriate clinical management of patients with a range of conditions.
Hearst Health Middle East represents the healthcare companies of Hearst Corporation in the GCC region and provides bespoke consulting services supporting the implementation of evidence-based medicine in clinical practise. The companies of the Hearst Corporation represented by Hearst Health Middle East include: FDB, Zynx Health and MCG.
The programme builds upon the success of the first phase of the project under which 30 National Guidelines and Pathways of Care were developed by the Middle East team from 2015 to 2016. As part of this new second phase of work, the team will continue to work in partnership with staff from the Quality & Patient Safety Department of the MOPH to update the existing 30 guidelines and develop 20 new National Guidelines and Pathways covering a range of key conditions affecting the Gulf state. Patient representatives will be included in this phase to ensure the perspective of patients with direct experience of healthcare in Qatar are reflected in the Guideline recommendations.
In addition to developing the core Guidelines and Pathways of the project, the Middle East team will drive the adoption of the Guidelines by health professionals and will develop and introduce a system of health outcomes measurement, to ensure measurable improvements in patient health outcomes are recorded. The team will also train the MOPH staff on key processes associated with the project.
To ensure the success of the project, FDB has partnered with Integrated Intelligence Services Holding (IIS Holding), a Qatari health management and technology company, leading the implementation of a range of innovative healthcare projects across the Qatar. Their team is led by Mr Robert Moorhead, the former Director of the Programme Management Office of the MOPH and brings local expertise of the Qatari healthcare system into the project team.
FDB will also work with Professor Aziz Sheikh from the world-renown Usher Institute of the University of Edinburgh. He and his team will be undertaking a research project to determine the most appropriate risk calculator for Qatar, which will be used to determine an individual’s risk of developing atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) in the future. This important research project will form the basis of future work to develop a bespoke calculator derived from data on the Qatari population and will thus be better suited to the needs of the country than existing published tools.
