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National Workshop on Accreditation and
Standardization of Health Services
9 February 2005, New Delhi
Theme Address
Dr S P Agarwal,
Director General of Health Services
I am very happy to be present here this morning at
the inaugural function of the National Workshop on accreditation and
standardization of health services.
Accreditation is a very important topic.
Accreditation is standardization of the medical manpower, which involves
standardization of nurses, of paramedical, of the medical equipments, of the
general administrative back up that we have and it is the standardization of
the all other facilities, the civil infrastructure, the electrical
infrastructure, the ambience, and even the environment.
Accreditation is related to insurance, it is related
to tourism, it is related to saving the costs and is
related to all those things that are the ultimate outcome to quality of
health care. And the ultimate outcomes can be achieved only through a process
of accreditation. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel because these examples
already exist in various sectors. In the civil aviation industry no aircraft
can take off unless a body certifies it to be fit to fly from the engineering
point of view. We cannot have a pilot who has already flown eight or ten
hours. But in the healthcare sector, a surgeon who has been up and active for
upto twenty-four hours is conducting operations.
Even scientific studies have shown that if one is in such physical state, he
is more liable to commit mistakes. Everyone knows that good quality is
essential, why? For the simple reason that poor quality is very very expensive in the health sector. Bad quality may be
cheaper to begin with, but is ultimately expensive.
Today, any doctor can perform any kind of surgery
without any check or regulation. Unlike the eye surgeons where some
standardization perquisite exists in the form that requires an
ophthalmologist to carry out a minimum two hundred cataract surgeries in a
year or else, it may be treated that he is not doing good enough. This has
not been done by any rule or executive order. Similarly, the professional
bodies have to develop their own standards and parameters for what is good
for them and feasible.
We also need to also talk about the environmental
quality when we talk about the quality healthcare. One may be an excellent
surgeon, but if the paramedic is not good or properly trained, they may spoil
the whole thing. There is thus a need for accreditation of the services
including medical laboratories and the equipments.
We are very fortunate to have a leader like Shri Prasanna Hota, who is laying stress on this very important issue
of accreditation of health services and I must say that accreditation and
standardization in health sector is the need of the hour.
There is a bill being formulated by the Health
Ministry for regulation of clinical practice, which would have some sort of
regulation in the clinical practices and even accreditation of medical
courses. The bill proposes the setting up of a regulatory agency, which could
accreditate facilities according to certain
standardized parameters. Experiences all over the world have shown that an
accreditation process helps in better health insurance, better medical
tourism, good quality healthcare and cost savings.
I will limit my comments to this and thank all of
you for your kind attention. I wish the workshop a great success. I look
forward to the outcome of this workshop.
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