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Now, accreditation for hospitals

Staff Reporter

NABH constituted to ensure quality of medical services

KOCHI: A National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers (NABH) has come into being for ensuring quality and standards of delivering medical services. Y.P. Bhatia, Chairman of the Accreditation Committee, NABH, said that constituting such a body was to ensure the spread of quality services across the country.

He was speaking during his remarks on the standards manual for hospitals at the international conference during the three-day Kerala Health Tourism 2006, which was inaugurated on Friday. The board was constituted by the initiative of Confederation of Indian Industry in association with Quality Council of India.

Already two hospitals have applied for accreditation of their services, he said. The NABH is in the process of creating pools of assessment teams so that it becomes easier for the teams to visit hospitals. The team will have a clinician, a hospital administration expert and a nursing professional.

There are 100 standards to be obtained and over 500 measurable objects. The whole procedure of accreditation is a three-cycle process, beginning with the hospitals seeking a pre-assessment procedure. The need of accreditation came up with the country boasting of world-class experts in medicine without the backing of an accredited hospital care system, he said. Even big names in medical services found it hard to answer queries regarding accredited medical care, Dr. Bhatia said.

The NABH is also a member of the International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua) and it will seek global recognition of its accreditation for the overall benefit of Indian healthcare industry, said Dr. Bhatia. The ISQua guideline for the NABH is to be an autonomous body with its own mechanism for improvement and not of policing, said Dr. Bhatia.

Accreditation of a hospital would be valid for only two years, after which the hospital would have to undergo another assessment.

On the scoring card, hospitals would have to score 70 per cent to get accreditation. The rest of the 30 per cent would have to be covered over the two-year period, Dr. Bhatia said.

The NABH has officials from the Department of Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology, representatives of Indian Medical Association, CII, some super-specialty hospitals, post-graduate institutes and consumer coordination council (which has 57 consumer associations).

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