For about 500 hospital applicants seeking accreditation from the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers (NABH), they would have to comply with additional guidelines on controlling hospital-acquired infections.
The NABH has formalised an agreement with medical-devices company Becton Dickinson (BD) to tackle hospital infections, even as it processes two more tie-ups with healthcare companies Johnson and Johnson and 3M, Dr Giridhar J. Gyani, NABH Chief Executive and Secretary-General of Quality Council of India (QCI), told Business Line .
The tie-ups
The J&J tie-up is to train new surgeons, before they get into their jobs, on aspects including controlling infection, he said. The 3M tie-up is to tackle medication errors, he added. A quasi-government organisation, the NABH is part of QCI, and covers healthcare organisations.
With the World Health Organisation pegging the rate of hospital acquired infections at between 15 and 40 per cent in developing countries, Dr Gyani said hospitals needed to be educated on such infections. Over 100 hospitals in the country are NABH accredited, he said, and it is expected that they keep a check on infections in hospitals.
NABH guidelines
Though the guidelines are voluntary, it will be applicable for the 500 applicants seeking accreditation, he added. The guidelines include features such as safe injection practices, waste management and infusion safety, and optimising/ minimising the stay of patients in hospitals, so that it benefits and is economical to both hospital and patient, he said.
The country is estimated to have about 40,000 healthcare organisations of all hues, and about half this number is institutions with over 20 beds, he said.
Private alliance
Responding to whether healthcare organisations would trust guidelines evolved with other private companies (BD, J&J and 3M, in this case), Dr Gyani said, the alliance with firms like BD and J&J were because they have large workforces for training. Their guidelines would be aligned with NABH, and “we will keep an eye that they do not promote their own products in the training programmes,” he said.
Emphasising that the process was above board, he said the guidelines took about six months to design, and they focus on the “national cause and not a company's cause”.
The Memorandum of Understanding signed with BD is for two years and similar agreements will be signed with the other two companies, he said.
The NABH's efforts to tackle the problem of hospital-acquired infections assumes significance given the prevalence of the problem, besides emerging concern over drug-resistant “super-bug” strains of bacteria originating from the country.