The National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers (NABH) is developing a separate set of standards for nursing homes and hospitals, including secondary and tertiary levels as part of its accreditation programme for the healthcare sector in the country.

The set of standards, to be announced soon, would be made operational by April 2007, putting in place separate norms for different types of hospitals. The district level hospitals will comparatively have lower yardsticks for management related issues, yet maintaining same level of patient safety as other hospitals, sources said.

Besides the accreditation system, which is voluntary, the government is also working towards bringing in regulation in all segments of healthcare delivery. The Quality Council of India in the health sector, which is framing the necessary standards in this regard, has completed the first phase of evaluating private hospitals and diagnostic centres as per the MoU with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

The QCI is in the process of networking with State governments. It has already tied up with Madhya Pradesh to develop quality assurance programme to improve the standards of district hospitals, PHCs and CHCs to begin with, sources pointed out.

There are at present 15,000 hospitals, including 600 district level hospitals and about 300 medical college hospitals, besides private nursing homes. The new moves to introduce different set of standards come in the wake of criticism for imposing same kind of yardsticks for all hospitals, including those catering to the masses.

After the accreditation programme was launched, 30 hospitals have applied for the same and a few were cleared. The rest of them are in different stages of evaluation, the sources said.

The NABH will soon be launching accreditation for blood banks, diagnostics centres, imaging services, dental/hospitals and ayurveda hospitals. According to rough estimates, about 250 hospitals in the secondary and tertiary sector would be able to comply with the NABH standards in the next two years. Thus a total of 550 hospitals (including 300 medical colleges) are likely to be accredited under the programme in its first phase.

`The cardinal points in accreditation standards for the medical colleges are patient safety and quality of care as the hospitals attached to them are expected to operate at the highest level. There have been concerns that many of them operate below par and there is a need to drive them to seek accreditation,'' the sources at the NABH said.

Among the 15000 hospitals, 30 per cent are in the public sector. However, the number of beds in the public sector is almost four times than that in the private sector. While 80 per cent of hospitals in the private sector have less than 30 beds, about 10 per cent of them are with beds in the range of 30-100. Only six to seven per cent of private hospitals have more than 100 beds, estimates said.