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Another Nair Hosp dept flashes ISO tag Madhavi Rajadhyaksha It's not just corporate hospitals that can flaunt fancy accreditations anymore. BMC-run Nair Hospital at Mumbai Central has been lining up its departments for a prestigious ISO:9001:2000 certification, making it the city's first public hospital to allow an objective body to evaluate its quality standards and dayto-day management. The psychiatry department, which acquired an ISO:9001:2000 certificate on March 23, is the latest success story. And the makeover is evident-the one-time paanstained 60-bed ward is now sparkling clean; serpentine queues have given way to a centralised appointment system; and medical records gathering dust in one corner have been neatly stacked in a record room. It took some meticulous planning, and a lot of motivation to make the move possible. "We identified two focus areas: safety of in-patients and better access and privacy for out-patients,'' said Nair Hospital's professor of psychiatry Alka Subramaniam. Take for instance, the electrical fittings in the wards, which were promptly shifted out of reach of patients, thus reducing the risk of suicides. Mondays are marked for open staff forums, where everyone from Class IV workers to doctors sit down and discuss grey areas and a prominently marked suggestion box urges patients to drop in their feedback. And the results are there for all to see. "When we started the evaluation, the average waiting time in the outpatients department was 3.5 hours, which has now been cut down to 40 minutes. So also, patients who earlier took two to six hours to retrieve their medical records from the hospital, now get them in three minutes flat,'' said Prakash Ghadgil of ACE-MEDINET hospital services who guided the hospital on the accreditation process. With 90 to 100 patients visiting the OPD daily, this could mean a significant shift in performance and a positive swing in patient compliance. The department joins the hospital's paediatric surgery department and medical intensive care unit which got the UK body's stamp of approval last year. A blueprint is currently underway for the anaesthesia, ENT (ear, nose and throat) and speech and audiology departments to acquire the standardisation. "Public hospitals have always been doing good work, but have lagged behind on documentation. The ISO stamp is a motivation for staffers too,'' said Nair Hospital dean Sanjay Oak. Interestingly, the stamp of approval has come at no additional expense to BMC. The Rs 50,000 certification fee has been raised by various hospital departments with help from generous donors. ISO FACTSHEET ISO is the International Organisation for Standardisation and is considered one of the foremost quality management system standards It is a self-directed system that urges an organisation to continuously improve its process and performance The certificate given to Nair Hospital is valid for three years, with an audit of quality management, every year HEALTHY CHANGE: Nair is the city's first public hospital to allow an outside body to evaluate its quality standards URL : http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=VE9JTS8yMDA3LzA0LzAzI0FyMDA3MDE=&Mode=HTML&Locale=english-skin-custom |
| Also see : Public Health, HIV / AIDS, HIV / AIDS : News Articles, Dementia & Alzheimer's, Visually Challenged, Community Health Insurance |
