What accreditation means
The Winter 2002 edition of Consumers’ Health Forum of Australia Inc’s journal The Australian Health Consumer published a number of articles on accreditation. In the Editorial, Mr. Lou McCallum, the then chair of the Consumer’s Health Forum summarised consumer expectations in the following way:
For consumers, accreditation is basically an issue of trust. People who use health services want to have confidence that those services are safe and will provide consistent high quality care. People understand that there are risks associated with using the health system, but they want those risks minimised.1
Health services that participate in accreditation, the policy makers, those that fund health services and accreditation agencies alike support these consumer expectations but define accreditation in more technical terms.
In November 2006, the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care circulated a discussion paper on standards and accreditation. The paper acknowledged that ‘further work will be needed to reach agreement on definitions for accreditation and related concepts and to communicate this to stakeholders’.
The paper defined the conditions for accreditation:
The two conditions for accreditation are an explicit definition of quality (ie standards) and an independent review process aimed at identifying the level of congruence between practices and quality standards.2
The International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua) lists a number of descriptors of accreditation.
Accreditation
• is public recognition of achievement by a healthcare organisation, of requirements of national healthcare standards
• is generally available to public and private sectors
• covers a range of healthcare environments from local community-based care through to tertiary level providers and healthcare systems
• may have specialized healthcare services as a particular focus
• is awarded based on achievement of quality standards and the independent external survey by peers of an organisation’s level of performance in relation to the standards.3
This report provides information to address the expectations of consumers for accreditation – ‘safe and consistent high quality care’.
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