Clinical Skills - Dr Alfred Dahbi, Assistant Director of Nursing (United Arab Emirates)

Please briefly describe who you are and your role. 

My name is Dr. Alfred Dahbi and I am the Assistant Director of Nursing - Professional Capabilities at a large healthcare provider in Abu Dhabi, UAE - we have more than 3000 nurses, 17 different hospitals, and more than 500 preceptors across the organization. 

What are the three key challenges in accessing evidence-based information within your role? 

1. The technological literacy of our nurses in accessing evidence.

2. The willingness to change the status quo.

3. The amount of evidence-based skills that you can find freely online.

It’s hard to choose which has more impact on patient care.

From your perspective, how important is nursing competency management within your role? 

Competency management in our organization is very important as it gauges and tracks the capability of our nurses to provide safe and efficient care for our patients.. 

What challenges were you attempting to solve when you started using Elsevier’s Clinical Skills? 

Some of the challenges we faced when using Elsevier’s Clinical Skills are the functionality, taking into consideration that we have more than 3000 nurses, 17 different hospitals, and more than 500 preceptors all over the organization. Getting them all to forget about paper competencies and move to a digital platform is challenging. We also had some issues when it came to assigning modules and preceptors for our staff. There were some skills that are inactive but are not changed in the modules, eventually we had to manually replace them which is a lot of work. We're hoping that following the launch of the new platform, these issues would be a thing of the past.

Do you think that Clinical Skills can help drive adoption of clinical standards across care settings? If so, how? 

We absolutely believe that Clinical Skills can drive clinical standards. A very good example is a common practice of nurses conducting auscultation of the abdomen before nasogastric tube (NGT) feeding which is now considered obsolete. This practice can be changed using Elsevier recommendations of utilizing assessment of gastric pH for gastric tube placement.

From your perspective, what are the biggest benefits of using Elsevier’s Clinical Skills? 

The wide variety of evidence-based practices that are bulked into one platform and accessibility of reports.

If you had a colleague that was considering Elsevier’s Clinical Skills, what would you tell them?

I would tell them to go for it as it could help reimagine the way nurses learn and implement practices at the bedside.