Indian Society of Health Administrators (ISHA) will be organising a competency-based one-year diploma programme on Hospital Administration. ISHA has been conducting short-term courses from three-days to four weeks conducted every year on hospital administration, nursing care administration, counselling techniques, legal aspects of healthcare public health and occupational health.

Dr. Ashok Sahni, professor and Honorary Executive Director ISHA said that courses organised by ISHA has a tremendous demand and so far it has trained 1.3 lakh candidates where around 10 per cent of the students are bachelor degree holders and remaining 90 per cent are medical professionals with minimum qualification of MD. The training programme does not encourage fresh graduates. Only those who are holding a responsible position in the hospitals are preferred. The course will help them to have a better understanding of data information among the several other issues.

The course comprises of a one-month theory session and 10 months for papers and projects. No exams are held and the diploma is awarded to the candidates based on the project efforts. "Students are forced to redo projects again if the standard of the presentation is poor and until the best effort is shown the diploma is not awarded," he informed.

In India there are around 150 institutes offering diploma in hospital administration and out of these there are around 25 alone in Bangalore. Several institutes in the city have started collaborating with foreign colleges who are keen to come to India and start the courses where the latter awards the degree and the institutes in India can have a better image of themselves.

The main thrust of ISHA is to ensure the total implementation of the central and state government polices on health care apart from training healthcare manpower, research on AIDS, tuberculosis, clinical based medicine and blood supply management and full-fledged consultancy service are to set up hospitals rejuvenate new institutions, medical equipment and out patient services.

The two-decade old, ISHA which is non-profit organisation is not government funded instead the fees from the training programmes is the main source of revenue.