Challenges in the Implementation Accreditation Process in the Hospitals: a Narrative Review

Accreditation is one of the standard assessment systems that plays an essential role in improving the quality of health services. This study tries to explore the challenges in the accreditation program by reviewing the studies and extracting their results and proposing solutions to address them.
This study was performed in 2017 as a narrative review. Articles were extracted from databases of Google scholar, Scopus, Ovid, Since Direct, ProQuest, Ovid, and PubMed from 2004 to 2016. About 30 articles were found in English and Persian, the text of each article was assessed several times and challenges of the studies were extracted, described, and classified
The results of this study were categorized under 14 themes: using inappropriate standards, inappropriate tools and inappropriate method for evaluating organizations, increasing costs, human resources, inadequate training, increasing workload, stress, lack of motivation, lack of teamwork and inadequate information of staff, shortage of time and duration of implementation, inappropriate scoring method, patient dissatisfaction, lack of backup resources and implementation method, subjective view of evaluators, copy of accreditation standards of other countries, not reviewing the content of the standards, and lack of budget allocation
Organizations that institutionalize the accreditation process in the body of their education, awareness and organizational culture can reach a higher level of quality in health services. Therefore, it is recommended to the authorities to read all the identified challenges and consider these points in their planning.