NABH (National Accreditation Board for Hospitals & Healthcare Providers) and BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in New Delhi to support hospitals in attaining quality-of-care standards for infection control.

This collaboration is an effort to strengthen health systems in India and promote continuous quality improvement to ensure quality care for patients when visiting hospitals with effective infection control practices in place.

With the wider rollout of community health insurance initiatives, there is an increased demand for bed capacity. Existing small and medium-size hospitals, estimated to account for more than two-thirds of all beds need to strengthen the quality systems. These hospitals can achieve quality-of-care systems by standardizing and adopting necessary infection control practices to ensure patient and healthcare worker safety.

According to Dr Giridhar J Gyani, Quality Council of India, Secretary General and CEO, NABH “Our objective is to develop a basic infection-control standard for all hospitals delivering healthcare in India. The association with BD will enable us to provide on- and off-site technical support to collaborating institutions for upgrading their infection control practices.”

NABH has recommended quality towards safe injection practices, waste management and infusion safety, to name a few, as minimum requirements across hospitals in India, following the lead of several facilities undertaking these processes.

Most of these hospitals are high in volume and have the bandwidth as well as the desire to improve clinical outcomes; whereas the quality of care in smaller hospitals, especially which are government empanelled is much more varied in terms of infection control practices. NABH is currently operating in India with nearly 500 hospitals in various phases of accreditation, and nearly 100 hospitals are already accredited.

Manoj Gopalakrishna, Managing Director, BD India, said “BD has always worked toward achieving our purpose of ‘Helping all people live healthy lives’. The MoU with NABH is an innovative collaboration for enhancing patient safety and healthcare worker safety in India. BD will leverage our global experiences in implementing infection control programs by supporting NABH to enhance infection control standards in the hospitals of India.”

This collaboration will have three phases. During Phase One, initial workshops would be carried out across hospitals in India to ensure that SAFE-ISM program is adopted by hospitals as a stepping stone towards achieving quality.

This will be followed by the second phase where Centers of Excellence (CoE) and Health Economic models will be developed for the benefit of Indian Healthcare after dissemination of Safe-ISM program. The last phase will augment national capability of standards dissemination by developing additional CoE.

SAFE-ISM certification will be viewed as a precursor for preparing HCO (Healthcare organisations) or SHCO (Small healthcare organisations) for NABH accreditation. Through its experienced field force, BD will guide applicant hospitals toward SAFE-ISM preparation and other relevant training and development workshops.

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