At the RCP, we've led quality improvement for decades by defining standards of excellence. Our Accreditation Unit supports healthcare providers through structured programmes that enhance patient care, safety, and service delivery.
Our approach involves multi-professional groups, including clinicians, managers, and patients developing clear standards. Accredited services assess themselves against these standards, continually improving and demonstrating their progress annually. Every five years, our expert assessors conduct detailed on-site evaluations.
Additionally, we oversee quality assurance and certification for endoscopy trainee practitioners.
Is your service registered for accreditation?
Why accreditation is essential
Accreditation is a voluntary process for services to engage with. It is a team-led process and acts as an indicator of quality for patients, services, commissioners and the wider community.
Benefits of accreditation include:
- Raising the profile of a service across the organisation and leveraging support for investment
- Independently measuring services against national standards and reducing variation
- The opportunity to showcase the achievements of a service and the quality provided to patients
- Inspiring services to continue to achieve increasingly high standards
- Demonstrating a service’s dedication to improvement, patient safety and reducing risk.
Put simply, accreditation means that patients can have increased confidence in their service and be assured of receiving high quality consistent care.
Accreditation is supported by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and a number of our RCP accreditation programmes have already been recognised as an information source to inform inspections.
Benefits of accreditation guide
Our accreditation programmes
The Accreditation Unit manages accreditation programmes in a number of clinical services, including:
Our JAG data and training programmes
We also manage four programmes that use data to support the training and development of endosopists and the endoscopy workforce
Within our JAG endoscopy accreditation programme, we support the delivery of high quality and standardised training for endoscopists as well as the endoscopy workforce.
This further supports the delivery of excellent patient care by ensuring endoscopists are continually developing their practice. More information about this can be found on the JAG website.