From a Storeroom in Amman

I did not begin in management. I began in a storeroom.

My first role in a hospital was as a clerk in medical records at Jordan University Hospital, in 1987 — maintaining files, learning the international codes for diseases and operations, understanding how a hospital remembers its patients. A few years later I moved to the general store, responsible for the inventory and the purchasing of medical supplies.

People imagine a storeroom is a simple place. It is not. A hospital store is a problem of balance: order too little, and a ward is left short; order too much, and money sits on a shelf, ageing, when it could have been used elsewhere. In those years I learned to use economic order quantity models — a way of calculating, properly, how much to hold and when to buy — and to run tenders and negotiate with suppliers so the hospital paid a fair price. It was unglamorous work, and it taught me almost everything.

What the storeroom taught me

It taught me that good operations are mostly arithmetic and honesty. It taught me that the people who do the supplying, the cleaning and the maintaining are professionals, and that they respond to being treated as professionals. And it taught me that a hospital is a single system — the storeroom, the laundry, the maintenance workshop and the ward are not separate places, but parts of one body.

From that store I went on to manage a department of more than two hundred people, and then to Saudi Arabia — first to Tabuk, and from 1999 to Riyadh, where I have worked ever since. The institutions grew larger and the responsibilities heavier.

But the lesson of the storeroom never changed, and I have carried it through every role since: take care of the small, ordinary things completely, and the large things tend to take care of themselves.