The National accreditation Board for Hospitals
and Healthcare Providers (NABH) will launch surprise checks on accredited
hospitals to ensure that institutions continuously meet the criteria of
quality, NABH chairman Narottam Puri said on Thursday.
Delivering the sixth ‘Prof. T.K. Partha
Sarathy Endowment Oration' under the auspices of the Sri Ramachandra University
(SRU), he said the Board meeting in December had decided that the NABH will go
for surprise checks as otherwise the system would be ineffective because at the
end of the day, accreditation was a largely voluntary process.
The NABH also adopted the procedure of
granting reaccreditation after a period of 18 months to monitor a hospital's
continuous commitment to quality, Dr. Puri said.
Since its inception in 2006, the NABH had
granted accreditation to 129 hospitals from a pool of 562 applicants and issued
reaccreditation to 13 institutions. While NABH accreditation was increasingly
being sought by private hospitals as a quality differentiator, quite a few
large Government hospitals had also come forward for accreditation, Dr. Puri
said.
The standards set by NABH which were uniquely
tailored for the Indian healthcare and kept patient safety at the heart of the
process, are now being applied for accrediting blood banks, small
single-speciality hospitals, allopathic clinics and imaging units.
However, a challenge faced by the NABH was its
imperative to uphold quality while not ignoring the equally pressing need to
address issues of accessibility and affordability of healthcare especially in
rural India, he said. The NABH, which was assisting the Union Ministry of
Health and Family Welfare frame licensing guidelines for implementing the
Clinical Establishments Act and standards for all steams of medicine, was also
in consultation with the Medical Council of India on introducing
patient-centric quality assurance in the medical curriculum, he said. The NABH
was also trying to increase its pools of assessors and consultants, he said.
Dr. Puri, who traced the evolution of the
quality movement post World War II, felt that in India, which as a country was
so used to quantity and size, quality was now becoming centre-stage not just in
manufacturing but in healthcare too. Interestingly, this push for quality in
healthcare had come not from the Union Health Ministry but from the Tourism
Ministry vis a vis its stake in medical tourism.
According to Dr. Puri, among licensing,
certification and accreditation, accreditation was the important thing in healthcare
not just because it was a marker of certain standards but also because unlike
certification where the institution could set its own bar – for instance
setting 24 hours as turnaround for lab reports and meeting it – accreditation
required adherence to a set of standards set by an independent entity. And,
among all the stakeholders who stood to gain from accreditation it was the
patients who stood to benefit the most, he said.
Accreditation also stimulates continuous
improvement, raises community confidence in services, provides an opportunity
to benchmark against the best, improves overall professional development of
clinicians and paramedics and provides an objective system of empanelment by
insurance and other Third Party entities, he said.
V. R. Venkataachalam, SRU Chancellor, P. V.
Vijayaraghavan, Dean-Education, Kalpana Balakrishnan, Professor, Environmental
Health Engineering, Vijayalakshmi Thansekaraan, Controller of Examinations, and
Balaji Singh, member, endowment committee also participated.
The Hindu
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