Only 6% private hospitals had licences in 2019

Only six percent of the private hospitals were found to have licences during an assessment conducted in the country in 2019.

At that time, 35 percent of the hospitals, out of the 1,117 surveyed, were operating without any licence while 59 percent applied for new or renewal of their licence.

The assessment, however, will not support the latest status as many private hospitals already have received licence, thanks to the recent drive by the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), said the experts involved with the assessment.

With the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), icddr,b conducted an assessment in two phases – from April to May 2019 and August 2019 to January 2020.

Dr Shams El Arifeen, senior director at the icddr,b, presented the findings in a data sharing event with the journalists where officials from the DGHS spoke of different issues regarding relevant laws and the realities.

Currently, about 80 percent of hospitals in Bangladesh are private. Due to rapidly increasing numbers of facilities, many of these operate with little regulation.

The assessment highlighted a number of reasons behind this like lack of knowledge on legal bindings, long approval process, limited capacity of the smaller hospitals, difficulties in getting the approval from the environment and the narcotics department, etc.

In another presentation, Dr Sheikh Dawud Adnan, Deputy Director (Hospital) of HSM at the DGHS, on the other hand opined that the existing ordinance offer a very relaxed process to get a licence. "Anyone irrespective of qualifications can get a licence to run a private health facility. This has resulted mushrooming of such private facilities countrywide."

Comparing the licensing procedure in India, he said, "Getting a license in India is not as easy as in Bangladesh. They require 25 types of documents, and the regulatory body can equally monitor the private and the public facilities."

To improve the quality of the private healthcare services, there should be five key indicators, including, self-inspections, regulatory inspections by third parties. Survey on consumers can also help.

Based on the findings many steps were taken by the hospital services management (HSM) unit of the DGHS, Dr Supriya Sarker, programme manager of HSM at the DGHS, said while speaking at the event.