Professional bodies should provide accreditation of healthcare services to improve patient safety.

“We tend to default too quickly to top-down rather than peer review as the best way of improving standards,” the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, is reported as saying of the NHS. Accreditation is a well established form of external peer review that takes place in education. In healthcare, however, it is patchy, and some clinical services have none. Although accreditation is not a panacea for failings in healthcare and is only one part of the jigsaw that makes up the pursuit of clinical excellence and patient safety, 3 it can help substantially in reducingmedical errors; in one study the improvement was found to be around a 50% reduction in medical administration errors. Accreditation may help to raise standards by highlighting trusts that have poor staffing levels, allow poor practice, or fail to follow professional guidelines. Patients benefit from confidence that the services they are using have accreditation, and they can make informed choices if some services have not achieved accreditation. Commissioners of clinical services can also benefit from knowing that the services they fund meet key standards. Emerging evidence shows the benefits of accreditation systems. Shaw and colleagues found that accreditation was positively associated with having strong clinical leadership, systems for patient safety, and clinical review. Other evidence has shown that accreditation may help to introduce a mindset and culture of high performance. Accreditation is often considered in terms of hospitals, but it presents opportunities (and challenges) for general practices too. Accrediting bodies