Wesam is a Physician, a Paediatric and Neonatology Consultant, a Healthcare Quality and Accreditation Consultant, and a Fellow at the International Society for Quality in Healthcare (ISQua), with a PhD in Health policy and management.
During her PhD she conducted research on policy transfer of hospital accreditation to LMICs, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR). She developed an integrative literature review that analysed the development of hospital accreditation in LMICs using policy transfer theory as a conceptual framework. After which she conducted an international comparative study among three countries in the region (Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan) to explore their national accreditation systems, how far their systems are developed and sustained, what factors enabled and hindered the implementation process, and what are their future plans for the viability of these national programmes.
Lastly, she explored the role of international state and non-state actors in supporting quality and accreditation activities in countries with low resource settings or with political and economic instability. The ultimate goal was to draw lessons for governments in LMICs to help them establish their accreditation systems that can fit into their national health policies and suit their fragile local contexts. She has also participated with the WHO-EMRO in a qualitative research study looking at the role of public sector hospitals in the EMR and challenges and priorities in improving hospital performance and management in public hospitals, in addition to the national and local practices in strengthening hospitals in the region. Based on this study, a hospital management training need assessment was done for senior hospital managers in the EMR and an outline of hospital care management training programme was proposed.
Another qualitative study she worked on with the WHO was about mapping quality and accreditation programmes in the EMR countries and developing a set of quality indicators (and their metadata) for Primary Health Care facilities and pilot testing the tool in the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Tunisia and Egypt.
Finally, for her master’s degree in Paediatrics, she conducted a quantitative research study on Health-Related Quality of Life in Egyptian Children and Adolescents with Haemophilia A where she looked at the impact of the development of factor VIII inhibitors on patients’ health-related quality of life.