Accreditation pathway
By participating in accreditation, services are enrolled on an ongoing programme of service and quality improvement. A high-level overview of the accreditation pathway is depicted below.
The site assessment
To gain accreditation, a service must undertake a site assessment. To maintain accreditation, a service undergoes annual reviews for four years and then a full site assessment on the fifth year. Watch the video to find out more about the site assessment.
Tracking progress
Participating services have access to the accreditation standards via a self-assessment tool. The tool allows services to review:
which standards they meet and have evidence for
which standards they meet but need to collate evidence for
which standards they are not meeting.
The tool enables services to target their team’s improvement efforts. Downloadable summaries are available which enable services to track and share the progress being made towards achieving PR accreditation.
Once a service can fully demonstrate that they meet the standards, an accreditation assessment will be organised to review the evidence submitted by the service. An on-site assessment will also take place, usually lasting one day.
Award of accreditation is subject to an ongoing annual review process to ensure the standards are continuing to be met. A site assessment is undertaken every five years and between these assessments there is an annual remote review of key pieces of evidence to show that the service is maintaining the standard.
Assessment team
The programme provides a comprehensive training package for supporting assessors.
Typically, the assessment team consists of a physiotherapist or nurse who work in a PR service and a lay assessor, representing the patient voice. They may not have personal experience of using a PR service.
Assessors undergo a blended training programme of both face to face and online learning to fully understand the accreditation pathway, the standards and how to carry out assessments.