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Paediatrics: Audiology

Answer

The Improving Quality in Physiological Services (IQIPS) accreditation scheme is run by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS). The process of accreditation provides an independent assessment that a service meets the accreditation standards.

It is the responsibility of the service to ensure that they conform to the standard before application to UKAS for accreditation. There is a pre-registration process within the scheme that enables all services to be able to do an effective gap analysis so that they should be at a point of conforming to the standard on making an application to UKAS. If during an assessment mandatory findings are raised which show non-conformity to any part of the standard then the service agrees appropriate improvement actions with the UKAS team to rectify these and prevent re-occurrence.

The UKAS team base their recommendation for accreditation on the findings raised relating to the conformity to the standard, risk and whether the agreed improvement actions are appropriate and can be achieved within a three month close-out period. Therefore any findings raised must be cleared by the organisation if a positive recommendation for accreditation is to be granted.

In Commissioning Services for People with Hearing Loss: A framework for clinical commissioning groups, published in July 2016, NHS England strongly encourages clinical commissioning groups to expect providers to have completed the IQIPS self-assessment tool and applied for accreditation with UKAS, and achieve accreditation within the duration of their contract.

UKAS are supporting the NHS England business objective to increase the use of accreditation, and information about those services which have achieved accreditation is not held by the Department or NHS England, but is publicly available on the UKAS website.

Information on clinical contracts is not held centrally by NHS England.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

HL889

Session

2017-19

Grouped for answer

Yes

Subjects

Standards Paediatrics Audiology

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.parliament.uk