APPLICATION OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH STANDARDS AS A PRE-REQUISITE FOR THE ACCREDITATION OF THE HEALTH CARE INSTITUTIONS

Document Type : Review Article

Authors

1 post Grad., Institute of Environmental Studies and Research, Ain Shams University

2 Institute of Environmental Studies and Research, Ain Shams University

3 Faculty of Commerce, Ain Shams University

Abstract

Accreditation in health care is an integrated process that includes a set of steps by which the health institution is assessed to see if it meets a set of criteria and grounds associated with quality. The quality system in the field of health care is very private and the most important feature of this privacy is that, it deals with humans whether they are service providers or beneficiaries of this service, so many international organizations have started in establishing rules for the accreditation systems of health-care institutions, focusing primarily on the patient benefiting from the service, as well as the technical, administrative and technological aspects of the service delivery systems healthcare. The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of hospital accreditation on the quality of health services delivery, from the point of view of the health service providers and recipients of the service. This study is investigated the physicians, nurses, others and health perceptions of the impact of accreditation on quality of health services.
The researcher has used the Descriptive Statistics (SPSS) statistical analysis software; proper statistical tests had been used for this study, which provides quantitative description of the individuals' persuasions, attitudes and opinions as well as percentages, arithmetic means, and standard deviation for hypothesis testing. This study relies on the survey (accreditation instruments tool) as an essential tool for hospitals that successfully passed accreditation foundation level. The survey tool composed of two parts: the first part is related to the demographic characteristics of the study sample, and the second part is related to the impact of the accreditation system on improving and developing the qualitative level of healthcare services in the hospital. The responses have been categorized into five levels on a Likert scale, starting from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree).
The study identifies the methods of achieving TQM through the application of the accreditation criteria in one of the hospital of the Egyptian Ministry of Health. The study surveyed 500 clients of the health care services recipients and 400 service providers. A total of (400) questionnaires were distributed to the service providers, (560) for the service recipients and (500) questionnaires were retrieved from the service recipients and )360) and staff.  The results of this study have shown that health accreditation leads to the improvement of the quality of the provided healthcare services, from the point of view of both recipients of the health service and health providing services. Accreditations are necessary to be applied to health care organizations and systems and are designed to support and sustain improvement of patient care and environmental safety.
 

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