Self-assessment of Public Healthcare Facility in Conformity with Accreditation Guidelines for Quality Services

Abstract

There is a growing global concern for healthcare quality and patient safety and several countries have initiated accreditation and self assessment programmes for improved quality healthcare and patient safety. Both are based on the quality improvement framework and standards. Case studies have shown that: I) Accreditation certification of hospitals and healthcare facilities has been improved the quality of healthcare and related healthcare services. ii) Self-assessment by healthcare organisations has proved to be very useful tool for continuous and sustainable improvement in organization performance, quality of services, patient satisfaction over and above building the self-confidence of the care providers. In context of facility assessed it was carried out using a checklist specifically designed for this study with 318 items. The scoring pattern comprised total points and percent compliance for functional capacity of the hospital in comparison to prescribed norms. Assessment revealed maximum compliance in the categories of MIS and communication (100%). The facility lacked standard operating procedures, quality assurance system and fire safety system. Self-assessment as continuous feature will lay the basis for planning new interventions for impacting over all quality healthcare outcomes as well sustainability.