Hospital Accreditation: What Difficulties Does It Face in Iran?

INTRODUCTION To determine if an established programme is achieving desired goals and objectives, in other words being effective, health-care policy makers need to recognise and cope with its challenges. This paper made an effort to pinpoint the main difficulties which appear on the way to successful implementation of the Iranian hospital accreditation programme, from perspective of hospitals medical and clinical staff, and accreditation authorities. MATERIAL & METHODS Applying a qualitative approach, we used semi-structured discussion guide in Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), as well as semi-structured In-Depth Interviews (IDIs) with purposively selected hospitals staff and accreditation programme authorities. Data collection was conducted in Iranian universities of medical sciences from June to September 2014. In order to analyse collected opinions, thematic content analysis was applied independently by two authors. FINDINGS In addition to four independent FGDs with 27 participants, conducting seven individual IDIs were enough to reach data saturation. A total of 25 subthemes were emerged under five main themes. Participants were of the opinion that the accreditation problems include fundamental deficiencies in the Iranian healthcare system, poor design of the programme, deficiencies within hospitals, difficulties in surveyors and survey processes and negative impacts of the accreditation on hospitals. DISCUSSION Difficulties with the accreditation programme arise from a wide variety of sources. Decision-makers' achievements in the desired goals lie on recognizing and resolving them.