Question

Accreditation for hospitals in Saudi Arabia. Your opinion regarding: Its impact (at all different system level) positive and negative impact so far?

Answer 1

Accreditation of hospital is a program in which the qualified peers evaluate the quality standards of health care organization's compliance and check their pre- set performance. It's a continuous process of evaluating the health care facility to ensure effective care of a patient. In spite of having a time consuming process it has attracted many countries to enhance the quality of health care services. Saudi Arabia is one of the first country in Gulf who has implemented the health care region.

Evolution of Health care services in Saudi Arabia:

Saudi Arabia has taken positive measures in developing the health care services. Since, 1970's they are constantly working on the implementation of quality standards in both public and private sector. Both the sectors have experienced a rapid growth in increasing the numbers of hospitals and employees. With respect of this improvement in health care services the Ministry of Health Portal (MOH) in 1993 recognized a committee named as "National Committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA)" who has a authority to keep a check on the development of patient care services in Primary Health Centre. In 1995, they have also started a program to train the managers so that they can enhance the quality of Primary Health Centre. In 1994, Saudi Committee was established by a American Saudi Co-operation which performed various workshops, seminars to train the employees of various departments so that they can achieve the quality standards effectively and efficiently. Also, a technical committee was trained for measuring the performance of employees.This practice was initiated with the idea of improving the standards of all physicians who were providing health care services.

In 2000 the Makkah Regional Quality Program (MRQP) was established under the guidance of Prince of Makkah to enhance the Quality Standard of health care services and in 2003 the first publication was delivered which was applied to all Makkah hospitals. Finally, in 2005 the Central Board of Accreditation for Healthcare institution (CBAHI) was founded after the approval of Council of Health Services. The objective of this board was to know the health care services of both the sectors i.e Public as well as Private.

Impact of Accreditation :

Positive Impact :

The study shows that the implementation of accreditation has given a high positive effects on patient safety especially in terms of patient information, nursing documentation or any kind of health care infections. Accreditation has given a knowledge of how to keep hospital environment safe for both patient and staff. This has reduced the hospital infection rate and provided an insight for personal hygiene.

Overall it had changed the way healthcare services use to operate in Saudi Arabia. Better hospitals were designed and more trained and efficient doctors came into practice which led to overall betterment of healthcare service in the region.Pointers of positive impact :

• Clean hospital environment as the standards were raised
• Control on spreading of infections
• People of Saudi Arabia didn't had to go overseas as the healthcare services were now excellent and best
• Several rankings and standards were set which were to be followed by hospitals to ensure safety and proper care of patients.
• Better utilization of Blood banks
• Error per bed decreased

Negative impact of Accreditation :

There were no negative impact as such of accreditation of health care services in my opinion.However the only negative impact was the evaluation of quality standards of improvements programs .

And there were methodological challenges to measure the outcomes of accreditation.

It has limitations in accessing the interconnecting factors related to accreditation and it does not differentiate well between enabling factors.The cost effectiveness of this process was hard to analyze.