Joint commission versus Lebanese Ministry of Health : quality assessment and analysis of dietary standards: the case of Saint Georges Hospital

Abstract

Changes have been the password of the healthcare industry for the last three decades. It is known that the healthcare field is affected by three factors: quality, cost and operations (standard of care). These three factors are affecting each other and they are in constant change. Customer demand for better quality of care and safe patient care is increasing; new technologies and medical innovation are emerging every minute. Therefore change is inevitable in a modern healthcare system if standards of patient care are to be maintained and improved. In all businesses and in the healthcare business also, customers are now demanding higher quality, lower costs, and faster service times. To meet these requirements, healthcare organizations must continually improve their overall performance. In light of the emergence of a substantial number of hospitals and the increased competition that lies ahead ,quality of patient services especially dietary services have become and important issue. This thesis deals with the problem of improving quality of dietary services in Saint Georges Hospital —Achrafieh through a comparison between the Ministry of Health (MOH) dietary standards and those put by the Joint Commission for Accreditation of Health Organizations (JCAHO); also what gaps have to be filled and whether such standards are applicable to our culture and environment. Improvement of quality of dietary services pre and post accreditation implementation is also studied. The results show that JCAHO standards stress on the process of patient care whereas the MOH standards stress more on food service management standards. Thus both aspects, patient care and food service management, have to be taken into consideration when assessing quality in order to come up with standards that complement each other and both lead to improvement of quality in any dietary department. Moreover implementing standards in the hospital, specifically in the dietary department, significantly improved the outcome of quality of services given as shown through the statistics presented.