Twenty-four participants attended the first assessor training session on the National Green Hospital Standard on September 7 and 8, 2019, at the Public Health Foundation of India campus. Participants represented both public and private hospitals from different parts of India. The Health and Environment Leadership Platform (HELP), the Indian chapter of Global Green and Healthy Hospitals, participated in the event and has been integral to the development of the standard.
A monograph on “Green Healthcare Institutions” was developed in 2017 to serve as a guide for hospitals on how to build and manage health institutions while minimizing and mitigating negative impacts on public and environmental health. This monograph acted as the background literature for building a National Green Hospital Standards (NGHS) that are being developed by the HELP Secretariat along with the guidance from Quality Accreditation Institute (QAI) and theNational Accreditation Board for Hospitals & Healthcare (NABH) Providers.
Upon completion of this monograph, a complete National Green Hospital Standard Accreditation was developed in collaboration with QAI. The developed standard was open for stakeholder consultation from March 2019 to May 2019. Experts from various national and international bodies gave their comments and suggestions in the stakeholder consultation process. The standard was successfully registered under QAI in July 2019 and its first evaluator assessor training was announced.
Following this first successful training, QAI will be piloting the standard in hospitals in the coming months. Efforts are also in place to incorporate national green hospital accreditation standard into NABH standard in the future.
————
This article first appeared in HELP Newsletter which can be accessed here