Benoit Blondeau, MD MBA CPE FACS is trauma medical director and associate professor of surgery at the University of New Mexico Hospital and School of Medicine.

A surgeon and palliative care physician, he shares his clinical interests with operational and financial performance. Since the beginning of his career, and through various positions, he has acquired local and international experience in quality and accreditation. A graduate of the Bloch School of Management. His main focus is the link between operational efficiency, financial control and clinical outcomes.

He has served as a judge for the Asian Hospital Management Awards for several years.

Bio:

After graduating from the Faculté de Médecine de Tours, Dr. Blondeau completed a surgical training general surgery and organ transplantation and a master in business administration. He has served in several academic institutions, in France, Mongolia and in the USA.

Recently he has joined the department of surgery at the University of New Mexico as trauma medical director. For more than eight years, he has also served as an accreditation surveyor for the American College of Surgeons.

President, Private Hospitals Association of the Philippines

Dr. Girdhar J. Gyani is the Director General, Association of Healthcare Providers (India).    Mission of association is to build capacity in Indian health system through advocacy and education with focus on patient safety and affordability.

Prior to this Dr Gyani was Secretary General, Quality Council of India, an apex national body responsible for establishing and operating national accreditation structure and promoting quality in all walks of life.  Dr Gyani has been instrumental in establishing of National Accreditation structure for Hospitals (NABH) under ISQua accreditation, bringing patient safety & healthcare quality in the forefront in India.

Portland District Health (PDH) (Dec 2017 – till date): This is the westernmost regional hospital in Victoria with acute and residential beds. This hospital has staff specialist in General medicine, Cardiology, Surgery, Ophthalmology, Gynecology & Obstetrics, Anesthesiology with many other specialists employed as Visiting Medical Officers. The specialists are supported by a team of junior medical staff, who also are primary service providers in the Urgent Care Centre (UCC). The UCC is manned 24 hours by doctors on the floor.

My appointment at PDH is as Executive Director of Medical Services. My responsibilities include clinical governance, Credentialing and Scope of Practice for all doctors. I am also responsible for Risk and Adverse event review, Open Disclosure, Root Cause Analyses (RCA), external reviews and implementation of recommendations. As the EDMS, I am also tasked to review all coroners’ cases, legal claims and Freedom of Information requests. I sit on multiple Board and executive level meetings and am the chair for a number of them including Safer Care, Mortality & Transfer meeting, Credentialing meeting, Maternity meeting etc.

I am also one of the founder members in the newly developing regional Health Accord (hA+), Regional Credentialing and Scope of Practice Committee. My role here also includes developing a medical workforce model both for UCC and inpatients. In addition, I am also tasked to conduct all VMO contract negotiations (new contracts and renewals). I have also been made responsible for further recruitments to bolster the specialist model at PDH.

I have created and implemented the first of its kind Longitudinally-Integrated-Medical-Internship program at PDH with the first cohort starting Feb 2021. I am also the founder member of the body pursuing the introduction and delivery of the Rural Generalist program at PDH.

Dr Stephen Ayre is the medical professional lead at the Royal Hobart Hospital in Tasmania. This 500 bed tertiary hospital has recently implemented an Integrated Operations Centre (IOC) functional approach as a natural evolution of the bed management activities of the past. The IOC manages the patient flow activities of the organisation through daily safety huddles with strategic access to real time information informing decision making.

Rene Domingo is a professor of operations management at the Asian Institute of Management in the Philippines.  He holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from the University of the Philippines and an MS in Management Engineering from Nagoya Institute of Technology (Japan).  He trained on the Toyota Production System in Toyota, Japan.  He is the author of “Quality Means Survival” published by Prentice Hall. He has served as technical consultant of the World Health Organization – Western Pacific Region on Hospital Management. He has assisted hospitals in improving customer service, patient flow, and patient safety.