Beyond Compliance: The Impact of Hospital Accreditation on the Performance of the Healthcare Staff

Abstract

While hospital accreditation can be seen as an external process for ensuring healthcare quality, in practice, the extent to which formal standards are integrated into workers' day-to-day practice is important. This is an empirical study on the immediate impact of hospital accreditation practice on the performance of healthcare employees with the healthcare institutions that are accredited in Chennai. Leadership commitment, standards implementation, employee training and competency, and patient-safety and quality-improvement practices are measured as indicators of accreditation practices. There are two types of employee performance, namely task performance and contextual performance, and quality-oriented work behaviour, which are assessed.

The study uses survey responses from 156 healthcare workers and tests for a Pearson correlation and multiple regression analysis to identify practices associated with the best improvement to workforce performance. All three regression models were statistically significant, explaining 14.2% of the variance in task performance, 16.5% in contextual performance and 11.8% in quality-oriented work behaviour, respectively. In regard to individual predictors, employee training was a statistically significant predictor of task performance, patient-safety and quality-improvement practices were statistically significant predictors of contextual performance, and accreditation standards implementation was a statistically significant predictor of quality-oriented work behaviour. None of the other dimensions of performance showed significant association with leadership commitment when this was regressed on the other accreditation practices. The results suggest that there are specific pathways to workforce performance that are associated with accreditation, and that predictor-level significance is dependent on sample size and common variance between accreditation practices.