Pathology of the Fourth Generation of Accreditation from the Point of View of Managers of Selected Hospitals of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences: A Qualitative Study

It is necessary to evaluate the hospitals with the accreditation model and obtain the opinions and suggestions of the managers of the centers in order to improve the existing models more and more. The present study has been carried out with the aim of the fourth generation pathology of accreditation from the point of view of managers of selected hospitals of Hamedan University of Medical Sciences.

This research is a qualitative study with a content analysis approach, which was done in 2022. In order to collect data, in-depth and semi-structured interviews were used. The research community included 26 senior and middle managers of selected 8 hospitals of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences. Sampling was done purposefully.The data was analyzed by content analysis using MaxQDA 12 software.

According to the results, the challenges related to evaluators, hospitals, evaluation time, the nature of metrics, university staff experts and finally related to the announcement of the results were presented as the main themes of the pathology of the fourth generation of accreditation from the point of view of senior and middle managers. Among the aforementioned factors, the challenges related to hospitals, evaluators and university staff experts had the highest frequency compared to the challenges related to the evaluation time, the nature of the metrics, and the announcement of the results.

According to the findings of this research, after the pathology of the fourth generation accreditation method, it was determined that each of the accreditation areas related to evaluators, hospitals, evaluation time, the nature of metrics, university staff experts and finally the announcement of the results have not been sufficiently considered. Therefore, it is suggested that these cases be included in the future revisions of accreditation standards and criteria by the relevant officials.