Fundamentally healthcare accreditation is about improving how care is delivered to patients.
The demand for healthcare quality has risen due to various driving forces such as medical tourism, insurance, corporate growth, and competition.
As a result of these, the expectations of the stakeholders for best in quality has also risen, which led to the introduction of national and international accreditation bodies to act as a quality assurance mechanism.
Definition
A self-assessment and external peer review process used by health and social care organizations to accurately assess their level of performance in relation to established standards and to implement ways to continuously improve the health or social care system.
Accreditation systems
Accreditation systems are structured in a way to provide measures for the evaluation of the quality of care.
Accreditation focuses primarily on the patient and their flow through the healthcare system.
At the heart of these schemes is a list of standards which, ideally, serve to assess the professional performance in a hospital.
This includes not only hands-on patient care but also staff knowledge, credentials, clinical, research activity, ethical standards etc.
Dr. Khalid Abulmajd
Healthcare Quality Consultant