Saudi Arabia Health Management

Analyzing the effect of leadership styles on the quality of health management within health institutions in Saudi Arabia

Introduction

Background Information on Saudi Arabia’s Healthcare System

Saudi Arabia’s health sector is largely dominated by the public sector that controls about 80% of the market, with the Ministry of Health managing up to 60% of the industry. The private sector represented by for-profits and non-profit organizations oversee the remaining 20% (Alshammari, 2009).  Saudi Arabia’s government is committed to the improvement of access to quality health services of its citizens, evidenced by the prioritization of health care services at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels. In fact, so radical has been the transformation process that the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked Saudi Arabia as the 26^th nation out of the 190 world nations’ health care systems.

Despite such ranking, the issue of quality management has remained a bottleneck in the health sector in hospital institutions. Quality has been a key focus for the Saudi government and hence quality management is essential to achieve advanced performance. To make this a reality, sufficient support from top managing officials through involvement and commitment is required to enhance health service delivery (Alharbi & Yusoff, 2012). Health researchers have previously explored the quality management standards in Saudi Arabia’s public hospitals. The findings of these studies revealed that quality management in most Saudi Arabia’s hospitals is still weak and poorly implemented due to lack of commitment and involvement by top management representatives Damanhouri (2002). Another study conducted by Al Touri’s in 1998 established that programmes dealing with quality management in hospitals are unproductive. This study focus is on leadership styles because it is a critical concept that required implementing the complex and dynamic changes within the health care system (Oliver, 2006).

The leadership styles can be categorized as either transactional or transformational. Transactional leadership style is the type that embraces the top to down approach while transformational leadership is equated to democratic forms of leadership engaging leaders and followers in a common aim (Nafei, 2012). These leadership development theories share similarities with quality management practices that if implemented, contribute towards the general improvement in an organization’s performance. To date, no clear style of leadership has been noted as the most effective in organizations pursuing quality management practices. The statement of the problem would hence seek to investigate the influence that the leadership styles and involvement has on the quality of healthcare service delivery.

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The goal of this study is to analyze the effect of the leadership styles on the quality of health care services in Saudi Arabia hospitals. The study will therefore seek to answer the following research questions:

1. What types of leadership styles are most commonly used?
2. What are the leadership roles in healthcare provision?
3. Why are leadership skills critical in the provision of healthcare?
4. What is the correlation between leadership and quality management?

Research Design and Methodology

The nature of this research makes it suitable for a comparative study to evaluate the most effective leadership style in enhancing health quality management in hospital institutions. In order to undertake successful implementation of this study, the researcher will use a mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The qualitative methodology to be used will consist of focus group discussions (FGDs) with hospital employees. Questionnaire will also be administered to hospital staff. In-depth interviews (IDIs) will be conducted on key informants regarded as opinion leaders in the health sector. In this case senior hospitals managers will be best sources to collect primary data. IDIs will be best for the keys informants since gathering them into a central location would be a daunting task, given their busy schedules. Quantitative data will be collected from published literature. The data evaluation will be lead researcher will review existing publications and documents on leadership styles.

As an additional quality assurance measure, the researcher will conduct a back-check of all interviews conducted by the research assistants. Data analysis will go alongside data collection, enabling the researcher to do constant comparison. An electronic data base will be developed to analyze the quantitative data. This data will be analyzed using SPSS and Microsoft Excel. Basic data analyses, including frequencies, percentages, medians, averages, and cross tabulations, should be conducted.

The proposed research activities will take a period of 10 weeks from project commissioning to delivery of final report as highlighted below.

Study Task	Week
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Literature review & Desk Research
Pre-testing tools
Finalization of study instruments
Training of Research Assistants
Fieldwork (qualitative)
Data capture and analysis
Report and findings compilation