Future hospital inspections will look to healthcare science accreditation schemes – Chief Inspector of Hospitals
Professor Sir Mike Richards CBE, the Chief Inspector of Hospitals, has said that future hospital inspections will draw on data from Healthcare Science accreditation schemes such as IQIPS and PSQIP
Sir Mike has formally said that he and his team will be drawing on information such as service performance under the IQIPS Scheme (Improving Quality In Physiological diagnostic Services) or the PSQIP (Physical Sciences Quality Improvement Programme – currently under development by the Academy working with IPEM)
His statement in support of the schemes read:
“As Chief Inspector of Hospitals I am developing a model for hospital inspection that is robust, fair, transparent and helpful, playing its part in driving quality improvement.
“CQC cannot go into every corner of a hospital so we will mainly focus on those areas where patients are likely to be at risk. This means that we need to harness robust and timely information from other sources to provide a more rounded picture of a trust.
“Accreditation and peer review already play an important role in quality improvement in areas such as mental health, diagnostics and cancer and I strongly believe that such schemes have a key role to play in the future of hospital inspection.
“We need to use information from these schemes to feed directly into CQC monitoring processes and the development of trust-specific key lines of enquiry for use at inspections.”
