The journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health
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J R Soc Promot Health · Nov 2008
Review Comparative StudyThe role of organizational licensing in healthcare.
Much has been written about organizational accreditation in healthcare, but little attention has been paid to licensing providers as a means to control quality in the provision of health and social care. Licensing has a variety of different applications but frequently involves a mandatory assessment against standards. This paper reports on a comparison of the various ways in which the basic requirements for quality are framed in a range of licensing systems and concludes that there are considerable similarities in the approach to quality used across both health and social care licensing systems in many countries.
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J R Soc Promot Health · Nov 2008
Comparative StudyRegulation, measurements and incentives. The experience in the US and UK: does context matter?
Since the 1990s the US and UK healthcare systems have increasingly sought to measure the quality of services in order to stimulate improvement and publish the results. Despite the very different healthcare systems, there are some striking similarities in the results of these schemes. ⋯ However, these responses may be perverse: gaming, falsifying of data and measurement fixation have all been uncovered. In the UK context, information is closely aligned to the regulatory and performance management framework, and there should be a role for the new Care Quality Commission in the emerging 'information landscape' of the NHS in England.