60 seconds with Froilan Galima: PPU Dialysis Manager
What is your role and responsibilities within the PPU Dialysis Unit?
As PPU’s dialysis manager, I oversee the unit’s services and its stakeholders.
What is it about Dialysis that interests you?
Education and promotion. Renal disease as a whole is a life changing event. Most often, you will find patients who seem to have lost hope on having a normal life and the most fulfilling part of this is that you will be able to impart knowledge and expertise in encouraging and improving their lives whilst they trek the challenging life of living with kidney disease.
Dialysis treatment sessions can last for up to 4 hours. When a patient comes in, how do you help them to pass the time and take their mind off the situation or make them feel comfortable and relaxed in the unit?
In the unit, we value personalised care. We address individuals as service users rather than sick people who are in need of treatment. We welcome companions to a certain extent, depending on the clinical situation of the patients. We have an array of experts who are fluent with different languages and if possible, we speak to them in their native tongue and discuss relevant issues beyond their problems.
Some patients come into PPU Dialysis at least three times a week, you must have built a rapport with them. Does this help in delivering a more personalised and tailored treatment to them?
And on the patients’ side, what impact do you think this familiarity has on them?
Whenever possible, we offer treatment times suited best to the patient’s personal schedule to fit their other plans whilst in the country. We also have strong collaborative support from the admitting wards to help facilitate other care needs of these individuals such as therapies and other related appointments. Lastly, familiarity is best optimised when there are restrictions in consideration of the best interest of our service users. As a private practice, we ensure that we deliver what we always stood for, and that's World Class Care.
We have a flow of embassy patients in PPU Dialysis, how do you break down those barriers of communication and interaction so that you can deliver to your best in order for these patients to receive exceptional care?
Aside from the expertise of my team, we have an outstanding International team who are always there to render support in terms of communication, coordination and delivery of care.
What changes or new ways of working have you successfully implemented in PPU Dialysis during your time here and how has it helped the service?
We all know that there is increasing pressure in healthcare nationwide, if not globally. I always believe that staff members are the representation of the excellence or doom of any institution. I have started to promote a synchronised on-call shift pattern where staff can enjoy most of their off days without having the anxiety of being called to come to work at any given night. If the staff has an excellent work/life balance, you can almost guarantee energised staff to come to work all the time. Lastly, aside from haemodialysis and with the help of our most experienced management team, we are in the process of developing other services such as peritoneal dialysis and plasma exchange. We are trying to devise a more structured way of providing the services without compromising the provision of care, revenues and staff quality of life.
How do you like to keep the morale of the team and yourself high and positive?
In my experience with previous trusts, we tend to arrange regular team building. It’s something I would like to look at in the future. It’s a bit challenging to set up at this time as we try to get to know each other plus we all have our circumstances to attend to outside work, but definitely on my list to ponder in the next few months . For now, I try to be as transparent as I can in terms of my leadership. It's still early days and I have been working with esteemed colleagues who have been in this business longer than I am and we are different sets of individuals. With fortitude, I am positive that we will reach cohesiveness and be more efficient than we are now.
Tell us what you look forward to the most when you have finished your shift at work?
Home. I am a very hands-on father and a visible husband to my spouse. Gone are the days of excessive social life I guess!
If you could be a body part, what would you be and why?
Feet. I'm always moving forward.
Share with us some fun facts about the kidneys!
An adult’s kidney weighs about 5 ounces (142 grams) and is the size of a fist.