Abstract
A multifaceted approach is essential to ensure and sustain high-quality patient care in today’s complex healthcare environment. While quality accreditation serves as a critical benchmark for standardizing care and promoting continuous improvement, accreditation alone does not guarantee sustained quality outcomes. The long-term effectiveness of accreditation depends significantly on the engagement and commitment of the healthcare workforce, supported by leadership that aligns organizational goals with evidence-based practices. Knowledge-Oriented Leadership (KOL) has emerged as a strategic enabler that emphasizes knowledge creation, sharing, and application, thereby fostering learning environments, accountability, and informed decision-making within hospitals. Unlike transformational leadership, which primarily focuses on motivation and vision, or distributed leadership, which emphasizes shared responsibility without structured knowledge governance, KOL uniquely integrates leadership behavior with systematic knowledge management, making it particularly relevant for sustaining accreditation standards. Against this backdrop, the present study examined the interrelationships among quality accreditation, healthcare workforce engagement, and leadership as a moderating factor in multispecialty hospitals in the Delhi NCR region. A Digital Delphi methodology was employed to ensure methodological rigor and contextual relevance through structured, iterative feedback from a panel of healthcare professionals, accreditation experts, and academics. The Delphi process led to the refinement of an initial 20-item tool into a validated 44-item instrument designed to capture the complex dynamics between leadership practices, workforce engagement, and accreditation sustainability. The findings underscore the pivotal role of leadership-driven engagement strategies in maintaining accreditation compliance and enhancing organizational performance.
Keywords: Delphi Process, Healthcare Workforce Engagement, Leadership, Quality Accreditation