Exploring the hospital accreditation challenges from nursing managers’ experiences: A qualitative study

Context: Hospital accreditation (HA) is the systematic evaluation of the accepted standards by an independent organization, which consists of specialized and skilled people to improve the safety and quality of health‑care providers.

Aims: This study was conducted to explore HA challenges from nursing managers’ viewpoints.
Settings and Design: This qualitative study was conducted by a content analysis approach.
Subjects and Methods: Twelve nursing managers of one hospital were recruited by the purposive sampling method. Data were collected through focus group discussions and also unstructured and deep interviews

Statistical Analysis Used: Conventional content analysis was performed. Rigor‘s study was done through credibility and confirmability, transferability, and dependability.

Results: During the analyzing process, the 3 main themes and 11 sub‑themes including “negative emotions toward the process of evaluation (stress on staff, ignoring the staff, and “evaluator’s negative view),” “inappropriate evaluation procedure (nonprofessional performance of evaluators and inappropriate metrics scoring),” and “increased workload (lack of personnel and overdocumentation)” emerged.

Conclusions: Nursing managers experienced some enhancement over three courses of HA but their experiences revealed some barriers, which are thought‑provoking. Considering these challenges by the Ministry of Health and accreditation units of medical universities can facilitate the implementation of HA.