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.
Having developed standards with a multi-professional group of clinicians, managers and patient representatives, services participating in pulmonary rehabilitation accreditation work to an accreditation pathway which involves self-assessment and quality improvement against the standards. Accredited services 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.
Our history
The need for investment in pulmonary rehabilitation services was identified by the NHS England Chief Scientific Officer and other key stakeholders in 2015.
Following this the RCP ran an accreditation pilot to look at the feasibility of launching a full programme for the sector. The pilot was funded by NHS England.
Feedback from those involved in the pilot showed that there was a belief that an accreditation programme would positively impact on patient experience and that the standards and assessment process would improve the quality of pulmonary rehabilitation services.
The aim of accreditation is to provide a quality assurance mechanism that will reassure patients and commissioners that service provision meets national standards.
PRSAS works in collaboration with the National Respiratory Audit Programme to ensure audit data is used to evidence good practice and facilitate quality improvement.