CBAHI accreditation: a clear guide for Saudi hospitals in 2026

CBAHI, the Saudi Central Board for Accreditation of Healthcare Institutions, is the national body that accredits hospitals and other healthcare facilities in Saudi Arabia, and for most operators the question is not whether to deal with it but how to pass its survey and keep the result. This guide explains the legal basis, who must be accredited, the hospital standards, how surveys are scored and decided, the sanctions, the link with the operating licence and how CBAHI compares with Joint Commission International (JCI), as of November 2026.

What CBAHI is and who runs it

CBAHI’s own history, published on the Saudi Health Council website, traces its origins to 2001, when it took part in a quality initiative in the Makkah region. In 2005 a ministerial order turned that effort into CBAHI and extended its authority nationwide.

The board’s National Hospital Standards date its foundation to October 2005, as the Central Board for Accreditation of Healthcare Institutions formed by Ministerial Order No. 144187, and say that Council of Ministers Decree No. 371, dated 30 September 2013, changed its name to the Saudi Central Board for Accreditation of Healthcare Institutions. A 2012 brief communication in the Saudi Medical Journal by Qureshi and colleagues also records that the Ministry of Health established the board in October 2005.

Its stated vision is “to be the first health accreditation body in the region”, and its mission reads: “We support all health facilities through accreditation towards continuous adherence to quality and patient safety standards.” Its pages now sit on the Saudi Health Council’s website, and the council has a formal role in its newest powers, covered below. The council-hosted page on its mandate lists seven areas of work:

• setting standards;
• support and preparation of facilities;
• evaluation and accreditation;
• performance monitoring;
• recruitment and training of evaluators;
• research;
• representing the Kingdom.

The 2013 resolution set the board’s present role. In a Ministry of Health release of 1 October 2013, the then health minister welcomed the Cabinet resolution converting the board into a national centre and listed its tasks: adopting unified national standards for all health facilities in medical, pharmaceutical, facility safety and laboratory practice; reviewing them regularly; accrediting all health facilities in the Kingdom; monitoring performance indicators; training surveyors; building a database of health facilities; and cooperating with foreign accreditation bodies.

On its own portal, the board describes itself as the “national body for accreditation of healthcare facilities” and says it holds triple accreditation from the International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua). Besides hospitals, the portal lists a current accreditation programme for central blood banks and reference laboratories, a home healthcare services programme marked as future, and a medical coding programme launched on 9 April 2018. Its laboratory standards describe it as non-profit, and a 2023 peer-reviewed study calls it a national not-for-profit accrediting body.

Is CBAHI accreditation mandatory?

Yes, according to the board’s own standards and to Ministry of Health statements. The third edition of the National Hospital Standards says a Cabinet decree “mandated the national accreditation by CBAHI on all healthcare facilities” and that “all healthcare facilities operating in Saudi Arabia are required to achieve accreditation by CBAHI”. The standards identify it as Decree No. 371 of 30 September 2013, which the Arabic text of the board’s laboratory standards dates 24/11/1434H. The first edition of those national standards for clinical laboratories and blood banks, hosted by the Ministry of Health, says the accreditation programme has become national and mandatory.

The ministry said the same in April 2013. Reporting a ceremony for facilities that had gained national accreditation, the Ministry of Health news release of 13 April 2013 said a Health Services Council decision affirmed the obligation for government and private health facilities to obtain CBAHI accreditation, and that the minister urged private facilities to register quickly so they could keep their licences. The 2012 Saudi Medical Journal paper put it directly: “To operate in the Kingdom, the MOH has made it mandatory for all health facilities to acquire accreditation from CBAHI.”

What the documents reviewed for this guide do not give is a single current list of facility types and deadlines. The hospital standards apply to “all hospitals licensed to practice in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”, and separate standards cover laboratories and blood banks. Operators of other facility types should check the board’s current programme list before assuming a deadline applies to them.

The CBAHI hospital standards in force

The hospital standards reviewed for this guide are the National Hospital Standards, third edition (1436H, 2015), which apply to all surveys from 1 January 2016. That makes them more than ten years old. CBAHI’s main website blocks automated access, so we could not confirm there whether a later hospital edition has replaced the third, and we found none in the other official sources reviewed; hospitals should confirm the edition with the board before preparing for a survey. The third edition is organised as follows:

• “The standards are assembled into (23) chapters”, running from leadership, human resources and medical staff to infection prevention and control, medication management, laboratory, and facility management and safety.
• Clinical chapters cover provision of care, nursing care, anaesthesia care, operating room, critical care, labour and delivery, haemodialysis, emergency care, radiology, burn care, oncology and radiotherapy, specialised care services and dental care.
• Governance chapters include quality management and patient safety, patient and family education and rights, and management of information and medical records.
• “There are (16) Essential Safety Requirements” (ESRs), scored on an all-or-none basis.

The ESRs work differently from the rest of the standards. The 2015 edition says “partial compliance will not be acceptable for any ESR”, and full accreditation is not granted unless all ESRs are satisfactory. A hospital can score well across the 23 chapters and still miss full accreditation on a single ESR.

The board publishes separate standards for other services. Its National Standards for Clinical Laboratories and Blood Banks, first edition 2015, took effect on 1 January 2016, according to the copy hosted by the Ministry of Health. The portal lists the central blood banks and reference laboratories programme as current.

Who can apply and when

The hospital standards state that “all hospitals licensed to practice in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are eligible for CBAHI accreditation”, subject to conditions before a survey. One is operating history: “The hospital has been in operation for at least (12) months before the on-site survey.” A new hospital therefore cannot be surveyed in its first year, which matters for investors modelling the ramp-up of a greenfield site.

The standards also cap attempts. A hospital may have at most two real survey attempts within two years, with at least six months between them. A failed first attempt can delay a second by half a year, so a mock survey or pre-assessment visit, both offered by the board, is a practical step before a real one. Under the same rules, a hospital that is denied after two real surveys, or that passes two years from its first real survey without accreditation, is suspended from the national programme for 12 to 18 months and referred to the relevant authorities.

The CBAHI survey process step by step

The sequence below follows the third edition of the hospital standards.

1. Register. Complete the Healthcare Facility Registration Form on the board’s portal; the facility receives a code number for future communication.
2. Self-assess. Hospitals are “required to conduct a comprehensive self-assessment using the Self-Assessment Tool (SAT)”.
3. Choose a visit type. A hospital may request a pre-assessment visit, a mock survey or a real survey.
4. Apply for the survey. Submit the Survey Application Form, return a signed Service Agreement and pay the accreditation fees.
5. Receive notice. The board allows “a minimum of seven days” for hospital notification before the survey.
6. Host the survey. “CBAHI team conducts a three-day survey” unless volume, complexity or survey type requires more time. The team has seven healthcare professionals: a core team of an administrator, a nurse and a physician, and a specialty team of a pharmacist and specialists in infection control, laboratory, and facility management and safety.
7. Receive the report and decision. The decision follows the scoring rules set out below.
8. Appeal if needed, within 15 calendar days of receiving the official survey report.

The sections of the standards reviewed for this guide do not give fee amounts; they say only that fees are paid before the survey. Fee schedules were not available on the pages we could open, so this guide does not quote a figure.

Before booking a real survey, a hospital can check itself against the conditions and rules in the standards:

• at least 12 months of operation before the on-site survey date;
• registration complete and a facility code number issued;
• a full self-assessment completed with the SAT;
• evidence of full compliance with each of the 16 ESRs, since partial compliance is not accepted;
• a decision on whether a mock survey or pre-assessment visit is worth the time, given the limit of two real attempts in two years;
• a named owner for any appeal, which must be posted within 15 calendar days of the report.

How CBAHI surveyors score and decide

Each standard is scored on a three-point scale, with N/A where a standard does not apply. The thresholds below are those printed in the third edition.

Score	Meaning	Compliance level
0	Insufficient compliance	Less than 50%
1	Partial compliance	50% to less than 80%
2	Satisfactory compliance	80% and more

The decision then turns on the overall score and the ESRs:

Decision	Overall score	Essential Safety Requirements
Accredited	85% or above	All satisfactory, and no safety concerns
Conditional accreditation	75% or above and less than 85%	And/or some ESRs, not exceeding 25%, not satisfactory
Denial	Less than 75%	And/or more than 25% of ESRs not satisfactory

The standards also describe a preliminary denial stage before a final denial. In practice the ESR column is the one to watch: a hospital scoring above 85% overall but failing one ESR falls short of full accreditation, and failing more than a quarter of them leads to denial regardless of the overall score.

After the decision: monitoring, appeals and sanctions

CBAHI describes accreditation as “a continuous process versus a once-every-three-years evaluation”. Two mechanisms keep hospitals under review between full surveys:

• Midterm self-assessment: fifteen months from the date accreditation is awarded, the hospital begins a self-assessment and has three months to complete it.
• Random unannounced surveys: these may take place from 9 to 30 months after an accreditation survey. A five per cent sample of accredited hospitals is selected each year, and no fee is charged.

Appeals must be made within 15 calendar days of receiving the official survey report, by registered mail or fast courier; email and fax are not accepted. The sanctions are time-based:

• Denial: the hospital is barred from the programme for six months unless the Director General waives the period.
• Suspension: it “will not be lifted before a prohibition period of (12) months from the date of suspension”.
• Revocation: it bars participation in the programme for a minimum of 18 months.

For a hospital that depends on its accreditation status with payers or partners, these periods are the real cost of a failed survey: an 18-month bar after revocation spans several budget cycles. Our report on Saudi mandatory health insurance coverage covers the insurance side, where provider qualification is handled by a different body, the Council of Health Insurance.

How CBAHI links to the operating licence

The 2015 third edition of the hospital standards says the Ministry of Health is considering linking national accreditation by CBAHI with the licensing of private healthcare facilities, and is planning to make CBAHI accreditation a future prerequisite for renewal of the operating licence. Until then, it says, registration and enrolment with the board are accepted as satisfactory evidence for licence renewal. The laboratory and blood bank standards use similar wording: the programme is “planned to be linked with the licensure process”.

The ministry’s April 2013 release made the same connection in plainer terms, urging private facilities to register so they could keep their licences. The documents reviewed for this guide do not show whether the planned prerequisite has since been brought fully into force for every facility type, so hospital licence holders should confirm the current requirement with the Ministry of Health and the board at each renewal.

Two practical points follow. First, registration with the board is itself a compliance step, separate from passing a survey. Second, an operator planning a new hospital should expect a gap of at least 12 months between opening and the first possible survey, during which its licence position rests on registration and enrolment rather than accreditation.

How CBAHI compares with JCI

The JCI website lists the JCI Accreditation Standards for Hospitals, 8th Edition, as covering hospitals and academic medical centres. The core difference in Saudi Arabia is legal status. The 2012 Saudi Medical Journal paper contrasted CBAHI, “which is a mandatory accreditation”, with international accreditations that “many hospitals are seeking” willingly.

Point	CBAHI	JCI
Status in Saudi Arabia	Mandatory national accreditation under a Cabinet decree, according to CBAHI	Voluntary, according to the 2012 Saudi Medical Journal paper
Hospital standards	National Hospital Standards, third edition, effective 1 January 2016 (latest edition reviewed)	Accreditation Standards for Hospitals, 8th Edition (listed on JCI website)
Who sets the rules	CBAHI, with the Saudi Health Council approving regulations for its services abroad	Joint Commission International

Some hospitals hold both. King Abdulaziz Medical City, Central Region (KAMC-CR), the Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs’ medical city in Riyadh, said in May 2018 that it had been granted full CBAHI accreditation after a survey panel visited from 29 April to 2 May 2018, and that it had held JCI accreditation as an academic medical centre since March 2016, according to a Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs news item headed “KAMC-R (CBAHI) Full Accreditation”. A later MNGHA item lists KAMC-CR facilities in Riyadh, including King Abdullah Specialized Children Hospital. Its profile is in our Listed 100: King Abdulaziz Medical City in Riyadh.

Research on how CBAHI works inside hospitals is limited. A qualitative study by Alsaedi and colleagues, published in the Journal of Multidisciplinary Healthcare on 1 August 2023, interviewed 22 professionals from five CBAHI-accredited Ministry of Health hospitals in Madinah; the authors reported no specific funding. Participants described Ministry of Health hospitals as having been required to join the CBAHI accreditation process, and the authors noted that the national scheme is younger than international schemes such as JCI. A sample of that size describes experience in five hospitals; it does not measure outcomes.

What changed in 2025 and 2026, and the published numbers

The largest change is new reach. On 11 August 2026 the Ministry of Health reported a Council of Ministers decision enabling CBAHI “to provide accreditation services to healthcare facilities outside the Kingdom”, in accordance with regulations approved by the Saudi Health Council. The release said “the Council will approve the regulations governing CBAHI’s provision of accreditation services”. As of November 2026 those regulations had not appeared on the pages we could open, so the terms, fees and target markets for overseas accreditation are not yet published.

Renewals continue at teaching hospitals. King Abdulaziz University said on 24 September 2025 that its hospital had renewed its CBAHI accreditation after a comprehensive on-site evaluation; see our Listed 100 profile of King Abdulaziz University Hospital in Jeddah.

The most recent national total we found comes from the Saudi Health Council. Its report for 2025 put the number of healthcare facilities accredited by CBAHI at 2,594, Al Watan reported on 15 July 2026. The figure covers all accredited facility types; the report as described by the newspaper did not split it between hospitals, primary healthcare centres and other facilities, and we could not open the council’s report itself. The board’s portal links to a status-of-accreditation list for individual facilities.

The figure compares with 72 accredited hospitals at the end of 2012, which CBAHI’s then secretary-general gave at a Ministry of Health ceremony in April 2013, according to the ministry’s release. The two counts measure different things, hospitals only in 2012 and all facility types in 2025, so they show the programme’s reach rather than a like-for-like growth rate.

What to watch next

• The Saudi Health Council regulations for CBAHI accreditation outside the Kingdom, which the Ministry of Health said the council will approve.
• Any new edition of the National Hospital Standards to replace the third edition reviewed here, and the transition date for surveys.
• Whether CBAHI accreditation becomes a formal prerequisite for renewing every operating licence, as the 2015 standards said the ministry planned.
• The launch date and standards for the home healthcare services programme, which the board’s portal lists as a future programme.
• Any official split of the 2,594 accredited facilities in the Saudi Health Council’s 2025 report between hospitals, primary healthcare centres and other facility types.

We cover hospital operators in our Providers section, profile major Saudi hospitals in the Listed 100 and log regulatory dates on The Tracker. Hospitals with an accreditation decision to report can reach the desk through our contact page.