NABH wants Indian hospitals to maintain high benchmark

Bangalore, July 31 (UNI) To ensure high standards of healthcare in the country's hospitals, the newly-launched National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers (NABH) will set up a prescribed benchmark for hospitals seeking accreditation.

Informing this to reporters here today, Quality Council of India (QCI) Secretary General Girdhar Gyani, also NHBC CEO, said the Board, which came under the umbrella of QCI, had signed an MoU with Australian Council on Healthcare Standards recently with an aim to further strengthen the process of Indian Healthcare Accreditation.

He said the objective of the MoU was to review, support and update the Indian accreditation standards and train the assessors on planning and implementation of accreditation process.

As per the MoU, the Australian accreditation standards would be the recognised programme in India. This was being done to adopt same bandwidth of health standards prevailing in countries like Australia, United States and Canada which were the first to set up quality councils in healthcare, he explained.

Mr Gyani said ''The country's over 100 crore population is exposed to quality of healthcare and delivery safety. We have already lost some time as accreditation of hospitals should have begun much earlier. Going beyond the private healthcare providers, the NABH accreditation will revitalise some of the large healthcare groups like CGHS, PSU hospitals, government and defence hospitals.'' ''We want India to emerge a global healthcare delivery system on the lines of the IT industry. Increasing the role of health insurance and the consideration of consumer or patient rights as the predominant factor has created good demand for healthcare accreditation in India and medical tourism has further fuelled the demand,'' he added.

NABH Co-Chairman Somnath Das said so far 16 hospitals had applied for accreditation from the Board and of them the final assessment had been completed for the Malabar Institute of Medical Sciences, Calicut in Kerala. The other hospitals that had applied for accreditation included B M Birla Memorial Hospital of Kolkata, Escorts Hospital in New Delhi, Bombay Hospital and Narayana Hrudayalaya in Bangalore, he added.

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