What is accreditation?

Accreditation is a supportive process of evaluating the quality of clinical services by guiding services through a quality framework. 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 patients, services participating in JAG accreditation work to an accreditation pathway which involves self-assessment and quality improvement against the standards. Accredited services submit evidence annually 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.

The accreditation pathway

By participating in accreditation, services are enrolled on an ongoing programme of service and quality improvement. A high-level overview of the accreditation pathway is depicted below.

Read about the benefits of accreditation.

What to expect on your site assessment 

Tracking progress

Participating services have access to the accreditation standards via a self-assessment tool. The tool allows services to review:

• which standards they meet and have evidence for
• which standards they meet but need to collate evidence for
• which standards they are not meeting

The tool enables services to target their team’s improvement efforts. Downloadable summaries are available which enable services to track and share the progress being made towards achieving JAG accreditation.

A service must provide evidence that they have met all of the JAG standards. Once a service can fully demonstrate these requirements, an accreditation assessment will be organised to review the evidence submitted by the service. A site assessment will also take place, usually lasting one day.

A site assessment is undertaken every 5 years. Between these assessments, there is an annual remote review of key pieces of evidence to show that the service is maintaining the standard, this is known as the annual review.

There is an annual subscription for participating in the programme.

Assessment teams

The programme provides a comprehensive training package for supporting assessors. Typically, the assessment team consists of a clinical, nurse and management assessor who have experience in endoscopy service. A lay assessor is also part of the assessment team, though they may not have personal experience of using endoscopy service. Assessors undergo a blended training programme of both face to face and online learning to fully understand the accreditation pathway, the standards and how to carry out assessments.