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 IQILS accreditation work to an accreditation pathway which involves self-assessment and quality improvement against the standards. Accredited services submit evidence 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.
We interviewed North Bristol liver service to understand their experience of the IQILS accreditation process.
Our history
The IQILS programme was launched in July 2017 by the Royal College of Physicians' accreditation unit, who also oversee several other clinical service accreditation programmes. The programme is designed to support improvement in liver services in the UK. It is supported by the British Association for the Study of the Liver (BASL) and the British Society of Gastroenterologists (BSG) and also works in partnership with the liver Community, professional bodies and patient organisations.