Benghazi — The Benghazi Medical Centre recently held the first in a series of new bi-monthly training workshops. The project comes as Libya works to address the challenges facing the country's medical sector.

"It is a one of a kind workshop in terms of focusing on new doctors and transferring to them skills and experience by way of explaining focused medical techniques," faculty member Haitham al-Ghiryani said on June 20th.

"This workshop encourages doctors to have direct contact between the professor and the new surgeon and engage in a dialogue. It constitutes a transfer of knowledge from the old generation to the new one," he said.

Al-Ghiryani went on to say that Libyan doctors lacked nothing except the right help from the state in terms of compensating them for any additional work they perform in medical areas.

"There are no incentives for Libyan doctors; if there were incentives and appreciation for them there would be no doctors in private clinics, but rather all of them would be in public clinics for the good of the public. There must be supervision of doctors in everything they do because there are those who work in a moral way all of the time and those who only work so a small part of the time," al-Ghiryani said.

Dr Adil al-Tawati's quality and risk management team already conducts routine field visits with everyone from the general manager to the doorman to make sure care is up to international standards, he said.

Al-Tawati noted that one of the visits uncovered a problem with the freezer. He said the freezer belonged to the Medical Centre, but after the revolution and subsequent emergencies, it was turned into the morgue's storage site.

"We as quality management have assessed in the report we submitted that this is a place for storing dead bodies, but it is not suitable for post-mortem and receipt of decomposing corpses," the doctor added.

Al- Tawati noted: "In order to achieve quality standards we still lack considerably not only in medical equipment but with regard to concepts and documentation. For example, every operation will be documented, or that every procedure, whether administrative or medical, from admission of a patient until after his release, must be documented in the hospital."

With regard to instilling the importance of quality in the culture, al-Tawati said it would take a "long time to change social norms".

"We are very far from them. In order to reach quality standards we need many years of hard work in the health sector, focusing on human resources in Libya in terms of the culture of quality and false certificates," al-Tawati said. "We need the correct medical education, of a high level of advancement, in order to have skilled graduates, because education in Libya at the moment is honestly not remotely adequate."