Saudi German Hospital Ajman has completed the foundational stages of CXM’s Signature Patient and Employee Experience Program, the same program that positioned Saudi German Health Dubai among the UAE’s most recognized hospital networks for patient experience. The work is ongoing. What has been built so far changes everything that comes next.
Somewhere in your hospital, patients are forming opinions you will never read in a report
Before a test result is reviewed. Before a treatment plan is explained. Before any metric that hospital leadership tracks has a chance to register, a patient is already deciding how much they trust the care they are receiving. That decision is shaped by a hundred interactions that do not belong to any single department: the way an employee acknowledged them in a corridor, the clarity of the information they were given at reception, the tone of a conversation between two staff members they overheard while waiting. Individually, none of these seem significant. Cumulatively, they are the experience.
Most hospitals are not designed to see this. They are designed to measure outcomes, manage departments and report performance by function. The experience that patients and employees actually have, the one produced by all those functions operating simultaneously on the same human being, rarely has a single owner. It belongs, in practice, to everyone and no one.
This is the problem that CXM was built to address. And it is the problem that Saudi German Hospital Ajman has now begun, with intention and organizational commitment, to change.
What has been achieved
Saudi German Hospital Ajman has completed the foundational stages of CXM’s Signature Patient and Employee Experience Program, a structured, multi-phase transformation that CXM has developed and refined across healthcare and complex service environments into one of the most distinctive experience programs operating in the UAE.
The work is continuing. But what these stages have delivered is not preliminary. It is the most difficult part of any patient experience transformation: understanding, honestly and in detail, what patients and staff actually feel moving through this hospital, how care is perceived from the inside by the people delivering it, how it is experienced from the outside by the people receiving it and where the distance between those two realities is largest.
CXM’s Signature Program brings hospitality-caliber excellence to hospital environments, not by overlaying a different culture onto the organization, but by working with what is already there: the values that leadership holds, the care that clinical teams want to give, the potential in the operational reality that daily pressures often obscure. The work surfaces what the hospital already knows about its patients and its people, asks the questions that have not yet been formally asked and builds the shared clarity that makes any meaningful change possible.
“Patient Experience is something you become. This kind of transformation happens by intention and it takes presence, pride and people willing to shape something that outlives the moment.” — Raluca Berchiu, Founder & CEO, CXM
CXM’s Signature Patient and Employee Experience approach: built for hospitals that want more than a NPS score improvement
CXM’s Signature Patient and Employee Experience Program is not a satisfaction survey with a training session attached. It is a structured, sequenced hospital transformation, a redesign of how a hospital sees itself, how its teams understand their role in the patient experience and how leadership translates its values into daily operational reality.
The foundational stages that Saudi German Hospital Ajman has completed encompass three interconnected bodies of work, each building on the last:
The experience immersion
Most hospitals have never seen themselves the way this stage reveals them. What the experience immersion produces is not a report and it is not a score. It is a level of organizational self-knowledge that takes considerable capability to develop and that most institutions, regardless of their intentions, do not have access to on their own. Saudi German Hospital Ajman now knows, with precision and without the distortions that internal familiarity introduces, where its patient experience stands and what is producing it. That knowledge is the rarest starting point in healthcare transformation, because it requires both the discipline to surface what is actually there and the organizational trust to receive it honestly.
The hospital-wide mindset transformation
Genuine organization-wide alignment on patient experience is among the most difficult things a hospital can build and among the most valuable. It does not come from a policy, a training module, or a set of service standards communicated from the top. It comes from a process that is sufficiently rigorous, sufficiently human and sufficiently well-designed to create shared ownership across every level of the organization simultaneously, including the levels where patient experience has never previously been framed as part of the role. What Saudi German Hospital Ajman has completed through this stage is something most hospitals have attempted in some form and few have achieved in full: a workforce that holds a common understanding of what patient experience means here and a common sense of responsibility for it, that does not depend on reminders to hold.
Design and behavioural workshops
The distance between an organization that understands its patient experience and an organization that has changed it is where most transformation efforts stop making progress. The design and behavioural workshops are where CXM’s Patient and Employee Experience Signature Program closes that distance and the reason they work at Saudi German Hospital Ajman is precisely because they were built on the foundation the preceding stages created. The changes that emerged from this work are embedded in how departments operate, not appended to how they are supposed to operate. They are owned by the people responsible for delivering them. And they do not require the program to still be running in order to hold.
The three stages are not interchangeable and they are not optional. What Saudi German Hospital Ajman has built by completing all three is an organizational foundation that does not exist when any one of them is skipped, outsourced, or compressed into a shorter timeline than the work requires.
Why the people delivering the treatment in the healthcare are as central as the patients receiving it?
There is a version of patient experience work that focuses entirely on what patients encounter and leaves the employee experience as a separate concern for a different program. CXM has never accepted that division, because the experience a patient receives is inseparable from the experience the person delivering it is having.
When a staff member is unclear on what is expected of them in a difficult patient interaction, that uncertainty is felt by the patient. When there is a gap between what leadership says the hospital values and what the daily environment actually reinforces, the people closest to patients carry that tension and it shows. The conditions inside an organization are not separate from the experience the organization produces. They are the same thing, described from two directions.
CXM’s Patient and Employee Experience Signature Program engages both directions simultaneously. The employee experience is not a parallel workstream, or a separate patient experience training. It is embedded into every stage of the work. The same process that surfaces how patients experience the hospital also surfaces how teams experience it. The same conversations that build shared language around patient experience build shared clarity for the people responsible for delivering it.
“When a hospital places equal focus on Patient Experience and Employee Experience, it creates a cycle of trust, operational clarity and sustainable growth, happier patients, more engaged teams and measurable business impact.” — Dr. Yehia El Gabbani, Hospital Director, Saudi German Hospital Ajman
The foundation has been built. The work continues.
The completion of these foundational stages is a milestone and it is the right word for what it represents: a point in a longer process where the organization has built something it did not have before. Saudi German Hospital Ajman now has an honest, shared view of where its patient and employee experience currently stands. Its leadership team is aligned around what that means. Its workforce has been part of building that understanding rather than receiving it second hand.
That organizational clarity, the shared language, the leadership alignment and the behavioral foundation that the foundational stages produce, is what makes the next stages of CXM’s Patient and Employee Experience Signature Program possible. Hospitals that attempt to design distinctive patient experiences before their teams share a common understanding of what they are building toward tend to produce experiences that are inconsistent, short-lived and disconnected from the culture required to sustain them. The foundation is what makes everything else hold.
For the hospitals and healthcare leaders who are watching the trajectory of patient experience transformation across the UAE and the wider region, what patient experience in the UAE is becoming and what it takes to lead it: the organizations that are pulling ahead are the ones treating this as a sustained, structured discipline rather than a periodic initiative. Saudi German Hospital Ajman is doing exactly that.
“If excellence is the standard in the organization, then it has to show up in how patients experience care. Every time. That is a leadership decision before it is anything else.” - Raluca Berchiu, Founder & CEO, CXM
A hospital network holding itself to one standard
This milestone at Ajman sits within a broader commitment across Saudi German Health UAE, a network that has spent more than a year building what is now recognized as one of the most operationally embedded patient experience programs in the UAE and across the region. The Dubai network’s CXM-led transformation has contributed to earning the Gold Award for Patient Experience Excellence from the Arab Hospitals Federation, awarded from 267 submissions across 10 Arab countries. It was the first time a private UAE hospital network received that recognition.
The extension of CXM’s Patient and Employee Experience Signature Program to Ajman reflects a leadership conviction that the standard should be consistent across the network, not because consistency is a compliance requirement, but because patients make decisions about which hospital to trust based on the entirety of what they hear about a network, not just the reputation of one site.
Saudi German Hospital Ajman, established in 2018, serves patients across Ajman and the northern Emirates from a 43,000-square-metre, 200-plus-bed tertiary care facility. As patient trust and patient expectations in the UAE continue to rise across every sector, shaped by standards of service excellence that no longer respect industry boundaries, the hospital’s investment in structured experience transformation reflects an understanding of where healthcare is heading and what it takes to be ready when it arrives.
The experience of treatment is a leadership decision. CXM is the partner that stays until it becomes one.
There is a well-documented problem with external consulting in healthcare patient experience and healthcare transformation: the report arrives, the recommendations are presented and then the people who wrote them leave. What remains is insight without momentum, a clear picture of the problem and an organization that has not yet built the internal capacity to solve it.
CXM’s Patient and Employee Experience Signature Program is built on a different commitment. The firm does not design a patient experience training or a strategy to just hand it over. It stays present through each stage, through the work of understanding, through the activation of change across the organization’s workforce and through the period where new behaviors and new standards either embed into daily culture or drift back toward old habits. That presence is not incidental. It is the work.
Raluca Berchiu built CXM across more than fifteen years of working in the UAE, even across sectors that had never framed “customer experience” as a strategic discipline. In every environment the same pattern held. The gap between what organizations believed they were delivering and what the people on the receiving end actually experienced was larger than anyone inside the organization had recognized. Closing that gap required more than a diagnosis. It required staying through the change.
That is what CXM brings to every hospital it works with. And it is what Saudi German Hospital Ajman has experienced through the foundational stages of a program that is still running, because the most important thing about a transformation is not where it starts. It is what the organization becomes as a result.
About CXM
CXM is a UAE-based transformation partner helping hospitals and healthcare systems build patient and employee experience as a core operational capability, an integrated hospital patient experience and employee experience program, not just as a training but one that strengthens trust, improves staff engagement and creates the conditions for sustainable performance. CXM’s Patient and Employee Experience Signature Program brings hospitality-caliber excellence to hospital environments through a structured, multi-phase approach that moves from experience immersion through mindset transformation through behavioural design and continues until the change holds. CXM’s work with Saudi German Health UAE contributed to earn the Gold Award for Patient Experience Excellence from the Arab Hospitals Federation in 2025, selected from 267 submissions across 10 Arab countries. Founded and led by Raluca Berchiu.
Excellence is the standard. Experience is the evidence. | consultcxm.com
About Saudi German Hospital Ajman
Saudi German Hospital Ajman is a premier tertiary care facility established in 2018 and part of Saudi German Health UAE, one of the largest private healthcare networks in the MENA region. Operating across 43,000 square metres with over 200 beds and five operating theatres, the hospital offers a full spectrum of specialist services to patients across Ajman and the northern Emirates. Saudi German Health UAE is part of a group with over 35 years of history delivering clinical care grounded in the philosophy of Caring Like Family.