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Shaw makes an excellent point. For years, the NHS and the Department of Health had resisted any form of structured accreditation and inspection regime. I think accreditation, in the early 1990s, was rejected because, using US, Canada or Australian inspection criteria, many NHS providers would fail. Importantly, too, an accreditation regime would need to be blind to whether the provider was public or private and that would have made a mess of the untidy partition of healthcare provision that bedevils the NHS and the UK to this day.
My experience with accreditation visits is also smaller teams, using highly structured forensic inspection and 'follow the patient' processes. Accreditation inspections would typically also extend to reviewing the Board's minutes where connectivity to quality and accountability was involved.
It isn't how many people that are involved, but whether they know what they are doing. It doesn't have to be mob-handed, which I fear is the regime CQC appears to be adopting.
Perhaps they need to reflect on whether "less is more".
Re: Small, not large, teams assess hospitals internationally
Shaw makes an excellent point. For years, the NHS and the Department of Health had resisted any form of structured accreditation and inspection regime. I think accreditation, in the early 1990s, was rejected because, using US, Canada or Australian inspection criteria, many NHS providers would fail. Importantly, too, an accreditation regime would need to be blind to whether the provider was public or private and that would have made a mess of the untidy partition of healthcare provision that bedevils the NHS and the UK to this day.
My experience with accreditation visits is also smaller teams, using highly structured forensic inspection and 'follow the patient' processes. Accreditation inspections would typically also extend to reviewing the Board's minutes where connectivity to quality and accountability was involved.
It isn't how many people that are involved, but whether they know what they are doing. It doesn't have to be mob-handed, which I fear is the regime CQC appears to be adopting.
Perhaps they need to reflect on whether "less is more".
Competing interests: No competing interests