What is a surveyor?

An ACHS surveyor is a health professional trained by ACHS to assess the performance of health care organisations against the standards of our accreditation framework (EQuIP).

The surveyor workforce consists of around 370 experienced, senior health care practitioners with recent and broad experience in health care.

Many of the surveyors provide their time on a voluntary basis for around ten days per year while still employed in the health care industry.

Other surveyors are available for more than ten days per year and paid an honorarium, including our ‘coordinator surveyors’ who lead the survey teams. We also have one full-time surveyor, with the aim of increasing inter-rater reliability, in other words the consistency of decisions. 

The surveyors are trained and skilled in surveying techniques and are able to gather the relevant information to verify the health care organisation’s achievement in the standards being assessed.

The selection process of our surveyor workforce ensures the surveyors have at least five years of managerial experience and an excellent understanding of accepted industry standards and best practice.

The surveyors play a consultative role and provide education for the organisation to understand how to progress on their quality journey while ensuring they achieve the standards to the required level.

The ACHS is also fortunate to utilise the expertise of consumer surveyors who participate as crucial members of the survey teams on mental health surveys and on general surveys.