Suppose you have decided that you want to get a plastic surgery done overseas. It will cost less and you can get the procedure done quickly. There is no waiting period at many of the facilities that you have seen online. How can you be sure that they are safe? How do you know whether the doctors have the proper credentials in plastic surgery?
You have to make decisions about a major surgical procedure at a place you have never seen nor visited. Will it be clean? Will it have the necessary equipment that is working? Do they use latest state of the art technologies? One way you can be assured that they are a safe healthcare facility with the kind of care you would demand from your general practitioner down the street is to research whether or not they are JCI accredited. What is JCI? JCI stands for Joint Commission International. JCI Accreditation is considered as the gold standard for international medical facility credentialing. In the United States the Joint Commission has raised the standard in medical organizations and when they accredit a healthcare facility you can be rest assured that they are one of the top hospitals in the United States.
The JCI has this same level of standard and reputation overseas. They evaluate a facility and decide what they need to improve. They do not give their seal of approval unless that particular facility has met the standard of care set out by the commission. If you see the JCI seal of approval on an overseas facility you can rest assured that it is a safe and well run facility.
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International accreditation options // May 29, 2008 at 6:41 pm |
In much the same way that hospitals in many parts of the world outside of the USA and Europe are being recognised as being of high quality, there is more to international accreditation than the USA-sourced JCI. I would like to add that while JCI is a first rate organisation, they do promote their services very heavily indeed and with great skill. Some balance needs to be introduced into this picture, and other, extremely viable, options exist elsewhere in the world.
These include the Trent Accreditation Scheme from the United Kingdom, the Australian ACHSI group, and the Canadian CCHSA – all are perfectly capable of expertly surveying hospitals around the world and establishing through the accreditation process if those hospitals are safe for patients to consider utilising for their healthcare services. The costs of accreditation will always ultimately feed back to patients, and costs do vary between the various schemes.
Patients will benefit not only if they consider hospitals around the world for their healthcare needs (which is the fundamental argument underlying medical tourism), but also if they take into account not just American-sourced hospital accreditation but British, Australian and Canadian as well. The attached web page is informative.