Accreditation has been recommended as a mechanism for assuring the quality of private sector health services in low-income countries, especially where regulatory systems are weak. A survey was conducted in Mumbai, India, in 1997-98 to elicit the views of the principal stakeholders on the introduction of accreditation and what form it should take. There was a high level of support for the classi...

Emerging public health standards, performance assessment tools, and accreditation models hold significant promise for defining and standardizing public health practice, yet the lack of empirical research on their relationship to outcomes represents a serious barrier to adoption. Given the growing interest and momentum related to public health agency assessment and accreditation efforts, there i...

Medical education and training. The traditional approach to ensuring high quality medical care has focused on the training and credentials of individual physicians. Accreditation of cardiology fellowship programs by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education provides assurance that current standards are met for the length, content and quality of education and training (1). The pro...

T he American public tends to place a great deal of trust in those mechanisms that protect or serve the public interest. For example, we usually take it for granted that the hair stylist, plumber, or exterminator are competent because we recognize that each of these practitioners must pass a test or meet specified standards to qualify for a license. Similarly, we assume that public water suppli...

Accreditation is an instrument that is used worldwide to monitor, maintain and improve the quality of medical education. International standards have been defined to be used in reviewing and evaluating the quality of education. The organization and the process of accreditation of medical education programmes in the Netherlands and in Flanders are described in some detail. Accreditation can be b...

Benefits derived from the Council for Health Services Accreditation South Africa (COHSASA) accreditation of the Universitas Academic Hospital (UAH) in Bloemfontein are illustrated. Accreditation assessments were performed between 2001 and 2007, and full compliance with the COHSASA standards for Academic Hospitals was achieved. An initiative to develop thoracic surgery in central South Africa (S...

Dear Colleagues, I have wanted for a long time to share with you some developments in the accreditation of family med icine (FM) residency programs. In a recent member survey, 80% of you recognized the importance of the role the CFPC plays in accrediting these programs. First, a little bit of history. Dr Victor Johnston, the first Executive Director of the CFPC, saw the need for FM training sta...

OBJECTIVE using the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) Global Standards for Midwifery Education as a conceptual framework, the aim of this study was to explore and describe important 'must haves' for inclusion in a context-specific accreditation assessment tool in Bangladesh. DESIGN A questionnaire study was conducted using a Likert rating scale and 111 closed-response single items...