Balrampur hospital fails to get NABH accreditation

LUCKNOW: Officials of the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals (NABH) carried out an inspection at the Balrampur hospital and pointed out several shortcomings which need to be rectified for obtaining the prestigious NABH certificate.

“The NABH pointed out many areas where we need to develop, including documentation and patient care. We will work on this and the next inspection slated three months later will be the final one,” said Dr Rajeev Lochan, director of the hospital.

The NABH standards provide framework for quality assurance and quality improvement for the healthcare organisations. The standards focus on all aspects of service delivery like patients’ rights, infection control practices, trained and experienced staff, infrastructure, environment safety, processes and controls among many others.

A NABH-“mark of excellence” is provided after the organization is evaluated on these standards. Improving patients’ documents, as pointed out by NABH team, includes recording of all medical procedures done since day one, recording of blood pressure each time it is taken and also increasing the forms filled for each patient.

“The bed head ticket (patient’s file) which was in five pages will now be 15-page. This will help a doctor to correlate patient’s history in case of transfer to a higher centre and even in follow ups, which is not seamless right now,” said Dr Lochan. Crowd (patient queue) management, diagnosis and reporting and other areas were also included by the team.

“We are one hospital where the OPD goes beyond 10,000 on Mondays and remains high for the entire week but the points made by NABH will be worked upon and completed soon,” said Dr Lochan. Balrampur, if gets the NABH accreditation, will be the second hospital in the state after Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital to have the certificate.