International Healthcare Accreditation - Accreditation Services

Accreditation Services

If a hospital or clinic simply wishes to improve its services to patients wherever those patients come from (locally or from further afield), or wishes to attract medical tourists, how do they choose who to go to when contemplating accessing external peer review by an accreditation group such as those listed above.

There is a phrase in English – “horses for courses” – and no one healthcare system has a monopoly of excellence and no one provider country or scheme can claim to be the total arbiter of quality. The same is true of healthcare accreditation schemes.

For example, some countries (such as the USA) perform very poorly when it comes to providing anything close to universal access to healthcare of adequate quality to the population living within their own borders, while others (such as the UK) have tried to create state-funded systems which provide everything without the assistance of the private sector. Other differences exist – for example, general medical practice ("GP", also sometimes known as Family Medicine) is strong in the UK but weak in the USA, while US hospitals generally have greater expertise in marketing and billing. Different accreditation schemes are sourced out of different parts of the world, for example JCI out of the USA and North America, QHA Trent out of Europe, and ACHSI out of Oceania (see map). As no single international accreditation scheme enjoys exclusive rights to be seen as an overall world-wide-relevant scheme, some hospitals are looking towards multiple accreditation to achieve performance credibility in different parts of the world.

With respect to the cost of accreditation, this can vary enormously and it can be hard to find out precise data; in the case of JCI, the costs can be substantial.

With respect to hospital work, ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) is often mistakenly considered to be an international healthcare accreditation scheme. It is not.