AHHACON

A Congregation of Experts

The conference was attended by hospital administrators and students of hospital administration from across the country

1 in every 10 patients in hospitals has HAI. The additional healthcare cost due to HAI in US is four per 4.5 billion $ per year, said Col UB Misra, Professor and Head, Dept of Hospital administration, AFMC, Pune. He was speaking on 'Hospital Architecture and Infection Control' at AHHACON, the second annual conference of Association of Health and Hospital Administrators (AHHA), which was held on 28th and 29th November at Nellore in Andhra Pradesh. The conference was inaugurated by Dr Col AK Singh, Founder, Rueben Memorial Hospital, Patna and the organising secretary for it was Dr M Veera Prasad, CEO, Nellore Medical College. The conference was attended by hospital administrators and students of hospital administration from across the country.

Col Mishra further cited a systematic review of 300 studies, where the authors concluded that reduction in HAI is achieved by adequate hand washing facility, availability of sufficient space and isolation capacity." He also said that compliance of hand-washing increases when the wash hand basins to bed ratio is 1:1, number of wash hand basins is adequate and conveniently placed.

Prof Mohd Masood Ahmed, Principal, Deccan School of Management, Hyderabad spoke on 'Financial Benchmarking in Hospitals: A key to success'. He divided benchmarking into strategic benchmarking, functional benchmarking, financial benchmarking, process benchmarking, product benchmarking and operational benchmarking. He informed about the eight steps employed in benchmarking-identify processes, activities, or factors to benchmark, determine what type of benchmark is to be used, determine who or what the benchmark target is: company, organisation, industry, or process, determine specific benchmark values by collecting and analysing information, determine the best practices for each benchmarked item, evaluate the process to which benchmarks apply and establish objectives and improvement goals, implement plans and monitor results and recalibrate (modify) internal base benchmarks.

Speaking on 'Patient Safety', Dr S Manivannan, Executive Director, Kavery Medical Centre and Hospital, Trichy, said, to reduce enhance patient safety, one must identify high risk patient, use intermittent compression tool, anticoagulant and early ambulation. He informed that medical slips can be prevented by cross checks (check list / read back/ standardisation and simplification), discussion in mortality and morbidity meeting and usual immediate response like shout and punish.

C Rajeswari spoke on 'Challenges Faced By Nurses In Hospital Setting'. While speaking on manpower challenges in nursing, she said that nursing demand outpaces supply and quality healthcare depends on an adequate supply of qualified nursing personnel. An American Hospital Association report released in June notes 1,68,000 unfilled hospital positions nationwide; 1,26,000 were for nurses. A recent broadcast of 'Nurses: Critical Care' on the Discovery Health Channel predicted critical care nursing will be hardest hit, she added. While talking on work overload, she added that there is a concern for errors being made due to fatigue and the impact on the caregiver's health. The risks are increased when nurses work more than 12 hour shifts or more than 40 hours per week. “Surveys report that nurses spend too much time away from patients. Almost 40 percent of their time is utilised not doing patient care,” she added.

Speaking on 'Do we need accreditation', Dr P Satyanarayana, ICRI, Hyderabad, said, "The compelling factors for accreditation are patient safety, patient rights, medical audit, protection against CPA, other legal suits, caring for our customers and their satisfaction, best utilisation of our resource.

Increasing health insurance may soon turn to accredited hospitals and CGHS has already promulgated the notice to all the private hospitals treating the CGHS beneficiaries need to have NABH accreditation."

Speaking on patient identification tags, B Srividya, Senior Manager - Marketing, Healing Technologies, said, "Patient identification name tags are used to ensure error-free treatment to patients by a simple process of using name tags which creates a perfect match between the patient and the case record and substantially reduces underlying pressure on attending staff."

Speaking on 'Legal Obligations in Hospital Administration', Dr BV Subrahmanyam, said, "Out of the court settlement, arbitrations, withdrawing the complaints, etc, are not legal practices in many places. Unless there is a legal sanction, this should not be resorted. Institutional ethics committees - appropriately constituted - must be actively existing to facilitate clinical research trials etc. ICMR research guidelines and code of ethics must be followed for research grants and approvals."

Ala Sankaran, Chief Quality Officer, Global Hospitals Group spoke on 'Quality Methodologies, Tools and Techniques in Healthcare'. "The various ways to attain quality are Six Sigma, Lean Thinking, Balanced Scorecards, Standards-based improvement approaches, Excellence Models and Benchmarking, Quality Circles and TQM," she said. Elaborating on 'quality circles', she said, "A quality circle is a small group of six to 12 employees doing similar work who voluntarily meet regularly to identify improvements in their respective work areas using proven techniques for analysing and solving work-related problems." She concluded by saying, "The factor that leads to success or failure is often the least tangible one: culture of the organisation, effective improvement method will be the one that best fits the culture and choosing the method that the organisation will really use."

Being the tenth year of its formation, AHHA felicitated some senior hospital administrators. It also felicitated Rita Dutta, Associate Editor, Express Healthcare, for her contribution to healthcare writing.

EH News Bureau