Exploring Accreditation's Impact on Healthcare: A Staff Nurse's View

This essay examines the impact of healthcare accreditation on clinical settings from the perspective of a staff nurse. Accreditation, a voluntary program sponsored by non-governmental organizations, involves external peer reviews to assess compliance with pre-established performance standards, ultimately aiming to improve the structure and process of care. The essay highlights that while the author hasn't directly interacted with accreditation bodies, they acknowledge its significant influence on healthcare organizations worldwide. Accreditation helps identify deficiencies in care, promotes national standards, and can improve clinical outcomes. Benefits include attracting more customers, easier access to payer networks, and a competitive edge. Although limitations like time consumption and cost exist, healthcare organizations generally adopt accreditation to enhance service quality and reputation. Desklib provides access to this essay and other resources for students.

Being a staff nurse of recovery area, I have had no interaction with any particular
accreditation body as of now but it has many impacts on the clinical settings of any kind of
healthcare organization in all over the world. Accreditation is basically a voluntary program
which is sponsored by any non-governmental organization. Some trained external peers
review the compliance of a healthcare organization and compare it with pre-established
performance standards. It usually appears to improve the structure as well as the process of
care. The quality of healthcare has been a vital issue for most of the health organizations. The
prime goal of accreditation system is to identify the deficiencies in care so that the
deficiencies can be removed by the hospitals (Tabrizi, Gharibi & Wilson, 2011).
Hospitals are being recognized for their significant role in improving and advancing
the community health as well as wellbeing. It is the utmost responsibility of any healthcare
organization to provide a top quality service to its customers. In order to achieve that
healthcare organizations acquire lots of strategies and techniques. Accreditation in this regard
is considered as a useful means of establishing national standard in order to eliminate the
inappropriate care in healthcare organizations. Various studies have revealed that
accreditation programs contribute to the quality of healthcare services (Brubakk, Vist,
Bukholm, Barach & Tjomsland, 2015). There are even some considerable evidences that
show general accreditation program improves the clinical outcome and a wide spectrum of
various clinical conditions can also get benefited with it (Alkhenizan & Shaw, 2011). The
underlying standards and processes of accreditation are designed considering the needs and
expectation of any country. It identifies any risk associated with the care of patient which
may harm the health outcome of them. Accreditation brings many other benefits to the
healthcare organization as high the accreditation rank helps a healthcare organization to
attract more customers and it also impacts the productivity of the organization. Customers
rely on the established quality standards of the healthcare organizations which improves the

business. Again, accreditation also provides easier access to payer networks as well as
specialty medications which is beneficial too.
Independent validation of the commitment of hospitals towards the quality patient
care differentiates them from their competition as well. Accreditation puts a closer look on
each and every service quality of the healthcare organization and mentions all the gaps and
identifies the areas in which more attention is required. According to the report of the
accreditation, hospitals and other healthcare organization works to improve its performance
standard and as a result the overall service quality is improved which is good for the patients
and at the same time it increases the reputation of the hospitals resulting in a competitive
edge in the market. However, various limitations are there while choosing the correct
accreditation that suits the business. It is also a time-consuming process and in some cases it
takes time of a year or longer than that. The cost is another factor in this regard. But, looking
on the series of advantages of accreditation onto the business, healthcare organizations selects
them to get benefited (Algahtani, Aldarmahi, Manlangit Jr & Shirahb, 2017).

References
Algahtani, H., Aldarmahi, A., Manlangit Jr, J., & Shirahb, B. (2017). Perception of hospital
accreditation among health professionals in Saudi Arabia. Annals of Saudi
medicine, 37(4), 326. Retrieved from
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Juan_Jr_Manlangit2/publication/
318895488_Perception_of_Hospital_Accreditation_among_Health_Professionals_in_
Saudi_Arabia/links/5990095b0f7e9bf4fbd54343/Perception-of-Hospital-
Accreditation-among-Health-Professionals-in-Saudi-Arabia.pdf
Alkhenizan, A., & Shaw, C. (2011). Impact of accreditation on the quality of healthcare
services: a systematic review of the literature. Annals of Saudi medicine, 31(4), 407.
Doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.4103%2F0256-4947.83204
Brubakk, K., Vist, G. E., Bukholm, G., Barach, P., & Tjomsland, O. (2015). A systematic
review of hospital accreditation: the challenges of measuring complex intervention
effects. BMC health services research, 15(1), 280. Retrieved from
https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-015-0933-x
Tabrizi, J. S., Gharibi, F., & Wilson, A. J. (2011). Advantages and disadvantages of health
care accreditation models. Health promotion perspectives, 1(1), 1. Retrieved from
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3963612/