News article • 2 mins read
UKAS is pleased to announce that following a submission to the Care Quality Commission (CQC) third party peer review and accreditation scheme panel, two UKAS healthcare accreditation schemes have now been approved for use within the CQC hospital inspection methodology. Clinical Pathology Accreditation (CPA) and the Imaging Services Accreditation Scheme (ISAS) are now formally recognised as part of the CQC inspection programme.
CQC recognises the potential value of clinical service accreditation and peer-review schemes as information sources to support its inspections. Such schemes have the potential to provide useful intelligence and provide independent assurance that accredited services meet standards.
The Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) has developed, in association with the cross‐college clinical services accreditation stakeholder’s advisory group, a set of criteria to help CQC determine schemes that can provide robust and reliable information for consideration ahead of and during inspections.
The CQC will work with approved schemes to ascertain how best to incorporate information from the scheme. Schemes will require written agreement with the participating services to permit that the results of assessments can be shared with the CQC. In the interim, any publically available information (for example accreditation status) will be taken into account in the CQC inspection methodology, for inspections from 2015/16 Q1 onwards.