Responses to the Criticisms about “The Accreditation of Hospitals in Iran”

The authors should thank the authors of letter entitled "Iran Hospital Accreditation system" for their criticisms. In response to this letter, which includes some criticisms about our letter entitled "The Accreditation of Hospitals in Iran", the following points can be made: The overall purpose of this letter was to look at the status of accreditation from the past to the present time and had only given a general overview and the details had been avoided. This overview had been provided based on the valid references some of published by the authors of this letter. However, unfortunately, the order of these references had been displaced in the reference section. The correct order was as follows: 1. Lee HR (2012). The role of the Korean Hospital Association in Korea's healthcare accreditation system. J Korean Med Assoc, 55(1): 23-30. 2. Mate KS, Rooney AL, Supachutikul A, Gyani G (2014). Accreditation as a path to achieving universal quality health coverage. Global Health, 10(1): 68. 3. Donahue KT, Vanostenberg P (2000). Joint Commission International accreditation: relationship to four models of evaluation. Int J Qual Health Care, 12(3): 243-246. 4. Dastur F (2012). Hospital Accreditation: A Certificate of Proficiency for Healthcare Institutions. J Assoc Physicians India, 60: 12-13. 5. Warren C, Abuya T, Obare F, Sunday J, Njue R, Askew I, et al. (2011). Evaluation of the impact of the voucher and accreditation approach on improving reproductive health behaviors and status in Kenya. BMC public health, 11(1): 257. 6. Bahadori M, Ravangard R, Yaghoubi M, Alimohammadzadeh K (2014). Assessing the service quality of Iran military hospitals: Joint Commission International standards and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique. J Educ Health Promot, 3: 98. 7. Kweon TD (2011). Update of sedation in view of Joint Commission International standards. J Korean Med Assoc, 54(12): 1284-1288. 8. Bahadori M, Shams L, Sadeghifar J, Hamouzadeh P, Nejati M (2012). Classification of health structural indicators using scalogram model in Golestan Province, Northern Iran. Iran J Public Health, 41(5): 58-65. 9. Smits H, Supachutikul A, Mate KS (2014). Hospital accreditation: lessons from low-and middle-income countries. Global Health, 10(1): 65.