NABH accreditation for Indian hospitals: A new Paradigm of Quality Management in Hospitals.

Quality is some how described as the bottom ingredient of any service or product while measuring its value, worth, grade & attribute with other products or service. Quality has all together different component for healthcare & hospitals involving aspects of Safety, Access, Relevance to need, Effectiveness & Efficiency.

Hospitals are institutions providing services on broader scopes & play important role in nurturing & maintaining society, improving the standard of care means a lot for the hospital staff, patients & society.World over there have been major issues that have promoted quality concept in hospitals & the same were copied for offering in India  with different brands that are currently also availaible through various stamping agencies (Quality is now also promoted as Brand) .

Now the quality acrreditation is available through various reputed agencies like ISO , JCI & NABH for hospitals which have financially different value for different set-ups & currently many hospitals have achieved there accreditation after paying huge accreditation fees.

The reason behind all such accreditation is to assure not only the foreign patients but also the patients coming from different parts of india through a Unique Selling Proposition(USP) or Third Party Assurance .

Now the corporate hospitals are making more effort is promoting the quality as Brand than a measure to ensure safer, economic & effective services, This is same as the business-ROI model.

Smaller healthcare institutions are adversely effected due to the current set –up as such accreditations cannot be achieved through small budgets.

The Quality accreditation process have been drafted in such a stringent manner that it has become very difficult to achieve it without being supported by the exorbitant Consultancy firms that have expertise in preparing the huge paper work which only few can draft.The current model is quiet complicated & does not promote the basic sense of quality management as all smaller institutions are finding it very hard to get themselves connected to the improvement process.

It is now very much necessary to promote quality management as a developing system which not only promotes quality awareness but also its acceptability in healthcare organizations.

NABH should draft its standards in different category for E.g Stage- 1  to Stage -4 in a programmed manner so that even smaller organizations can participate in the quality improvement process with small budgets & can feel the improvement that the quality management can make in the patient care as well as institutional improvement process.

The indian government should also undertake necessary steps for promoting quality in healthcare than restricting & forcing institutions for adopting quality accreditations (Like the decision government has taken by restricting institutions for CGHS empanelment)