Investigating the impact of aligning accreditation, performance and quality management on hospital improvement: the case of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

With many global problems affecting the human population in recent years, which would include aging and increase in chronic diseases, hospitals are becoming overwhelmed by patients. To overcome this issue and ensure appropriate treatment is provided, many proposals and projects have been developed. Quality management is an aspect of care that is needed to minimize the time people stay at hospitals and improve the efficient delivery of healthcare services, while also, the presence of accreditation provides an international mean to assure proper quality of care and performance improvement is delivered. While performance improvement is mainstream in many fields, it is under developed yet highly pertinent to the healthcare sector in order to improve patient care and here is where the importance of this research is illuminated. The current research investigates the impact of accreditation on performance measurement in hospitals as an effective external assessment scheme. While also, investigating the effect of following international standards developed by accreditation organizations and maintaining high quality of care and performance improvement. Moreover, the current research was conducted at hospitals in different cities of Saudi Arabia, which could be generalised to the whole country and similar healthcare systems including: Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Based on the pragmatism philosophy, this research is of an exploratory nature, which adapts a mixed method design to collect data from different hospitals in different cities. The main finding of the current research is the provision of a framework which demonstrates the alignment and its connection to the external and internal environment. Moreover, the data were collected through case studies and questionnaires which provided the validation of the current research framework, two new internal environment factors namely: involvement and standardisation and an outcome to the alignment namely improvement. Hence, this research argues that following national and international standards of care are enablers for hospitals to achieve performance improvement and high quality care. Furthermore, the findings of this research suggest that accreditation is directly linked to performance improvement and is essential for the quality of care in hospitals.