Exploring Healthcare Accreditation: Hospital Standards and Licensing

This essay provides an overview of healthcare accreditation, focusing on hospitals in the USA. It defines accreditation and licensing, highlighting the roles of organizations like the Accreditation Commission for Health Care. The essay emphasizes the importance of accreditation for ensuring quality and safety, detailing the standards hospitals must meet, including service provision and quality improvement. It also explores the consequences of losing accreditation and the necessity of licensing for medical staff. The essay concludes by stressing the importance of compliance with accreditation and licensing requirements for all hospitals to maintain quality and avoid severe penalties. Desklib provides access to similar solved assignments and study tools for students.

RUNNING HEAD: HEALTHCARE ACCREDITATION 1
Healthcare Accreditation
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HEALTHCARE ACCREDITATION 2
Healthcare accreditation
INTRODUCTION
The organization of my choice is the hospital. Hospitals are required to be licensed and
accredited for them to practice on a daily basis. Accreditation can be defined as process of
review which allows healthcare facilities to meet certain regulatory needs that are established by
an accreditation organization (Aghaei Hashjin et al., 2015). Licensing on the other hand refers to
an agreement to perform a certain function for a specified period of time. Licensing and
accreditation are mandatory and there are different requirement for a hospital to be licensed and
accredited.
Accreditation organization for hospitals in USA
There are several organizations in the USA that provide accreditation to the hospitals.
They include the Accreditation commission for Health Care and the Accreditation Association
for Ambulatory Health Care .The purpose of accreditation is generally to allow the hospital reach
certain standards for it to operate. For example it should have a certain number of staff so that it
is allowed to offer services to consumers. Accreditation supports hospitals in that it motivates
them to reach the certain standards where they would be allowed to operate or carry out their
functions.
Importance of accreditation
Accreditation is important to both the organization, the patient, the community and the
general healthcare. Since the aim of accreditation is to ensure that the hospital are at certain
standards of operation, it enables the patients and the community to get quality or standardized
services. It also prevent the public from harm due to the low standards of operation.

HEALTHCARE ACCREDITATION 3
For the hospital to be accredited, it must meet certain standards. The requirements
include ability to provide services which can be evaluated by the Accrediting commission or
organization. The hospital must also demonstrate ability to improve on the quality of services
provided (Rosenthal et al., 2015). Another important requirement is that the hospital should
provide, tests, interventions and treatments that are prescribed by the accreditation organization.
Consequences for losing accreditation.
If a hospital loses its accreditation status, it might not be allowed to continue with
different medical interventions until it is able to proof otherwise. Hospitals need different
licenses and accreditation. It is a must for all nurses to be as well as doctors to be licensed before
they can practice in any hospital(Zarei, Daneshkohan, Pouragha, Marzban, & Arab, 2014.The
hospital has already received the nursing and the doctor’s licenses as well as the pharmaceutical
licenses.
If a hospital loses a license, then that means it cannot be able to attend to the patients or
the community at large. For a hospital to be licensed, it must meet certain requirements that
include having qualified or licensed nurses and doctors and the pharmacists as well. Licensing is
mandatory to a hospital since it is the one that indicates that all the medical staff are qualified
(Stalpers, De Brouwer, Kaljouw, & Schuurmans, 2015). Licensing is very important to all the
patients, community and the hospital since they will have to be attended to by a team of qualified
experts thus quality services. The consequences associated with accreditation process and
licensing are very severe as in most cases it involves a lifetime ban .All hospitals should
therefore make sure that they operate with the accreditation and licensing requirements.

HEALTHCARE ACCREDITATION 4
References
Aghaei Hashjin, A., Delgoshaei, B., Kringos, D. S., Tabibi, S. J., Manouchehri, J., &
Klazinga, N. S. (2015). Implementing hospital quality assurance policies in Iran.
International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, 28(4), 343-355.
doi:10.1108/ijhcqa-03-2014-0034
Rosenthal, M. B., Alidina, S., Friedberg, M. W., Singer, S. J., Eastman, D., Li, Z., &
Schneider, E. C. (2015). A Difference-in-Difference Analysis of Changes in Quality,
Utilization and Cost Following the Colorado Multi-Payer Patient-Centered Medical
Home Pilot. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 31(3), 289-296.
doi:10.1007/s11606-015-3521-1
Stalpers, D., De Brouwer, B. J., Kaljouw, M. J., & Schuurmans, M. J. (2015). Associations
between characteristics of the nurse work environment and five nurse-sensitive
patient outcomes in hospitals: A systematic review of literature. International
Journal of Nursing Studies, 52(4), 817-835. doi:10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2015.01.005
Zarei, E., Daneshkohan, A., Pouragha, B., Marzban, S., & Arab, M. (2014). An Empirical
Study of the Impact of Service Quality on Patient Satisfaction in Private Hospitals,
Iran. Global Journal of Health Science, 7(1). doi:10.5539/gjhs.v7n1p1