Hospital chiefs need to adopt proactive approach to deal with coronavirus outbreak threat

Heads of public and private healthcare institutions and facilities in Pakistan need to adopt a proactive approach and other habits of highly effective healthcare providers to deal with disasters, calamities and outbreaks, especially the ongoing epidemic of COVID-19, which has affected all the continents in the world except Antarctica and claimed the lives of over 3,380 people in several countries of the world.

“By adopting a proactive approach as well as other habits of highly effective people, as described by eminent scholar Stephen Covey, healthcare institutions and facilities in Pakistan can effectively deal with growing influx of patients, in case of natural and manmade disasters, calamities and epidemics like coronavirus outbreak,” said Dr Zakiuddin Ahmed, first and only certified physician trainer of Franklin Covey in Pakistan, while addressing a training workshop in Karachi on Saturday.

Over 55 heads of public and private healthcare institutions and facilities, including the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases, Civil Hospital Karachi, National Institute of Child Health, Dow University of Health Sciences (DUHS), Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center (JPMC), Baqai Institute of Diabetology and Endocrinology (BIDE), Aga Khan University Hospital (AKU) and Ziauddin University Hospital, attended the training and learnt about personal and organisational transformation.

The training of healthcare professionals on ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ was held under the banner of the Institute of Leadership Excellence (ILE) Pakistan, which recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with American consulting firm Franklin Covey improving leadership qualities of healthcare leaders in Pakistan to improve service delivery in the healthcare sector, enhance patients’ satisfaction at hospitals and help Pakistani hospitals become patient-friendly facilities.

Franklin Covey is a US-based international consulting and training firm that was established by the author of the world’s all-time bestseller ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ Stephen Covey. The company provides training and consultation services to people from different sectors, industries and areas across the world.

Addressing the participants of the training, Dr Zakiuddin Ahmed said the manual he elected to train the healthcare professionals and providers was the Urdu-translation of ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effectively People’ by Dr Zafar Mirza, the special assistant to prime minister on health, who has proved instrumental in containing the spread of coronavirus in Pakistan despite being a next-door neighbour of China, from where the epidemic of COVID-19 started and caused the maximum damage.

He maintained that there was an urgent need to have “leaders instead of managers” to run the healthcare facilities and lead the health sector in Pakistan, saying that lack of leadership had ruined the entire healthcare sector in the country.

“The poor state of healthcare in Pakistan is due to lack of leadership. Instead of managers, we need leaders to run the healthcare facilities and the entire healthcare sector in the country,” he said and urged the participants, who included heads of hospitals, heads of departments at large public and private hospitals, and professors, to read both the original book of Seven Habits and its translation in Urdu by Dr Zafar Mirza.

Dr Zakiuddin said the Institute of Leadership Excellence had already arranged training workshops on ‘leadership in healthcare’ at over 15 medical varsities and institutions, adding that soon such workshops and training sessions would be held at major medical varsities and tertiary-care institutions so that patient-care could be improved.