Becton Dickinson (BD) India, a leading global medical technology company in partnership with National Accreditation Board for Hospitals (NABH) has started a nationwide plan which will help hospitals across India to acquire NABH-Safe-ITSM Certification programme for infection control to deliver safe healthcare to patients. Tagore Hospital of Jalandhar, Punjab is the first hospital to get the NABH-Safe-ITSM certification.

Punjab and Kerala are the two states under the pilot programme started in March 2012. After Tagore Hospital, 21 more hospitals are undergoing the NABH-Safe-ITSM accreditation programme from Punjab and Kerala.

The NABH-Safe-ITSM certification for infection control is an important cornerstone of safe healthcare delivery recognising that many small hospitals lack the resources and managerial bandwidth to achieve the main NABH certification.

Under this programme, NABH recommends safe injection and infusion practices, biomedical waste management, healthcare workers safety and sterilization and disinfection, to name a few. NABH also provides a consultant through its technical partner – BD to help applicants build capability to run a robust infection control program, providing training content and surveillance tools, as well as conducting a baseline and an end-line assessment post the training, basis which the applicant hospital knows when it is ready to invite NABH assessors.

Manoj Gopalakrishna, managing director, BD India said, “BD has always worked toward achieving our purpose of helping all people live healthy lives. The NABH-Safe-ITSM certification is an innovative collaboration for enhancing patient safety and healthcare worker safety and will augment infection control standards in the hospitals of India.”

Thus it is hoped that this certification will serve as a stepping stone for all the hospitals to achieve the full NABH accreditation easily in future.

Dr KK Kalra, CEO, NABH said, “NABH is currently operating in India with nearly 864 hospitals in various phases of accreditation and 156 large hospitals are already accredited. There is a need for increased awareness among the healthcare facilities across India so that more healthcare organizations start participating in quality initiatives. There is a role for all the concerned stakeholders towards raising awareness and involving healthcare organizations to adopt quality standards.”

NABH and BD had entered a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in 2012 to support hospitals in attaining quality-of-care standards for infection control in three phases. During phase I, initial workshops were to be carried out across hospitals in India to ensure adoption of ‘Safe-ITSM’ by hospitals as a stepping stone towards achieving quality. The second phase will offer Centres of Excellence (CoE) and Health Economic models to be developed for the benefit of Indian Healthcare after dissemination of NABH-Safe-ITSM programme. The last phase will augment national capability of standards dissemination by developing additional CoE.