A Study on the Attitude of Healthcare Professionals Towards Quality Accreditation

Abstract

Accreditation of hospitals is considered one of the most relevant mechanisms to achieve improvement in the quality and safety of healthcare (8). Worldwide, accreditation is gaining popularity as an effective mechanism for external assessment of healthcare quality. It is considered a method to address the issue of healthcare quality and safety. Accreditation is the independent and systematic assessment of a hospital against defined standards and recognition of a certain level of achievements of those standards by an external body. It is a process of certifying the credibility of an organization. In healthcare, accreditation recognizes and certifies the capability of a healthcare organization in delivering an acceptable standard of healthcare services, which is based upon excellent and safe practices. In this study, healthcare professionals' attitude toward quality accreditation is examined to know about their accountability. Total of 604 healthcare professionals such as; consultant physicians/surgeons, duty doctors, nursing staff, paramedical staff/allied healthcare staff, hospital administrators/managers, others (housekeeping in-charge/blue collar employees and healthcare academicians from public, private and run by Trust located in the North and Central India were randomly chosen. Through the application of factor analysis two components are explored, i.e., service quality and adaptability. One way of ANOVA was applied and found that a difference among the categories of healthcare professionals is observed for these components.