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.
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.
For more information on the programme, please have a look at our 'Introduction to QPIDS' slides.
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 the Accreditation Unit at the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), who also oversee other clinical service accreditation programmes, including: