National Accreditation Board for Hospitals & Healthcare Providers

NABH is an acronym for National Accreditation Board for Hospitals & Healthcare Providers is a constituent board of Quality Council of India, set up to establish and operate accreditation programme for healthcare organizations. NABH was established in year 2006.

Overview

Organisations like the Quality Council of India (QCI) and its National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare providers have designed an exhaustive healthcare standard for hospitals and healthcare providers. This standard consists of stringent 600 plus objective elements for the hospital to achieve in order to get the NABH accreditation. These standards are divided between patient centered standards and organization centred standards.

To comply with these standard elements, the hospital will need to have a process-driven approach in all aspects of hospital activities – from registration, admission, pre-surgery, peri-surgery and post-surgery protocols, discharge from the hospital to follow-up with the hospital after discharge.Not only the clinical aspects but the governance aspects are to process driven based on clear and transparent policies and protocols.In a nutshell NABH aims at streamlining the entire operations of a hospital.

Sodium borohydride

Sodium borohydride, also known as sodium tetrahydridoborate, and sodium tetrahydroborate is an inorganic compound with the formula NaBH₄. This white solid, usually encountered as a powder, is a versatile reducing agent that finds wide application in chemistry, both in the laboratory and on a technical scale. Large amounts are used for bleaching wood pulp. The compound is soluble in alcohols and certain ethers but reacts with water in the absence of a base.

The compound was discovered in the 1940s by H. I. Schlesinger, who led a team that developed metal borohydrides for wartime applications (in particular, looking for a uranium compound more volatile than the hexafluoride to be used in isotope separation by gaseous diffusion; this line of research did not yield useful results). Their work was declassified and published only in 1953.

Properties

Sodium borohydride is an odorless white to gray-white microcrystalline powder which often forms lumps. It can be purified by recrystallization from warm (50 °C) diglyme. Sodium borohydride is soluble in protic solvents such as water and lower alcohols; it will also react with these solvents to produce H₂; however, these reactions are fairly slow. Complete decomposition in excess methanol can take nearly 90 min at 20 °C. It will decompose in neutral or acidic aqueous solutions but is stable at pH 14. These conditions can be exploited to allow sodium borohydride to react in a homogeneous manner, with reduced lifespan being traded against increased reactivity.