About accreditation
What is accreditation?
Accreditation is a supportive process of evaluating the quality of clinical services against established standards. Accreditation promotes quality improvement through highlighting areas of best practice and areas for change, encouraging the continued development of the clinical service. Accreditation is a voluntary process for services to engage in.
Services participating in primary immunodeficiency accreditation work to an accreditation pathway which involves self-assessment and improvement against the standards. The standards have been developed with a multi-professional group of clinicians, managers and patient representatives. Services can take anywhere between 12-24 months to be ready for an assessment, though this timeframe does vary depending on the support and time available in the service; there is no set deadline to have an assessment and the QPIDS team understand there are many factors influencing how services progress.
Services that are awarded accreditation submit evidence annually to demonstrate that they are continuing to meet the standards and have a 5-yearly on-site assessment carried out by our experienced assessment team.
What is QPIDS?
The quality in primary immunodeficiency services (QPIDS) accreditation programme is designed to support adult and paediatric immunodeficiency services in the UK and Ireland.
Accreditation involves evaluating a service against a set of standards to promote a culture of continuous improvement, thereby providing assurance to patients, referrers and commissioners about the quality of the service provided.
Our history
The programme was developed in 2000, under the auspices of the UK Primary Immunodeficiency network (UKPIN) and then was managed by UKPIN until 2015. Since then QPIDS has been delivered by the Accreditation Unit at the Royal College of Physicians (RCP).
Why does QPIDS matter?
Accreditation has played an important role in driving change in many areas of healthcare, including in mental health and diagnostics. Our aim is for the QPIDS accreditation programme to promote similar improvement in immunodeficiency services. The Care Quality Commission's (CQC) chief inspector of hospitals has acknowledged that accreditation has a key part to play in hospital inspections and recognises the value of such programmes as information sources.
Our experience has highlighted that participating in accreditation helps teams to:
improves service delivery and quality of care for patients
reduces variation in clinical services
highlight and share good practices as well as where to focus their improvement efforts
increases satisfaction with working conditions, leadership and accountability
embeds quality improvement in everyday practice and supports teams to work collaboratively.
Accreditation provides a sense of pride for services in being able to show that it offers a well-led, patient-centred and safe service. Accredited departments can also be more attractive to potential employees and trainees.