Why hospitals get away with poor infection control

In 1989, Dr Narin Sehgal got a licence to open a five-bedded nursing home in Delhi’s Paschim Vihar – without having to establish any infection control protocols.

“We had learnt about basic sterilisation, cleanliness, donning, and the importance of cleaning the body before surgery in medical college,” Sehgal said. “But we knew nothing beyond that about infection control.”

Nursing homes that ran out of residential buildings did not even have space for infection control, he noted. “I realised everybody practiced infection control differently. It was arbitrary,” he said.

In 2005, the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals was formed to improve healthcare quality in India by laying down standards for certification.

An NABH accreditation is not mandatory, but it is much coveted. The same year, Sehgal decided to get his nursing home accredited – it would improve his nursing home’s rating and draw more patients.

By then, it had expanded into a 30-bed facility – without any official scrutiny of its infection practices.

Applying for the accreditation opened Sehgal’s eyes to the shortcomings in his nursing home’s infection protocol.

For instance, the nursing home had a small room with a steriliser machine and a wash basin where sterilised and non-sterilised instruments would often mix. NABH told Sehgal he would have to convert it into a...

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