Abstract:
Background: Accreditation has become ubiquitous across the international health care landscape. Award of full accreditation
status in health care is viewed, as it is in other sectors, as a valid indicator of high quality organisational performance. However,
few studies have empirically demonstrated this assertion. The value of accreditation, therefore, remains uncertain, and this
persists as a central legitimacy problem for accreditation providers, policymakers and researchers. The question arises as to
how best to research the validity, impact and value of accreditation processes in health care. Most health care organisations
participate in some sort of accreditation process and thus it is not possible to study its merits using a randomised controlled
strategy. Further, tools and processes for accreditation and organisational performance are multifaceted.
Methods/design: To understand the relationship between them a multi-method research approach is required which
incorporates both quantitative and qualitative data. The generic nature of accreditation standard development and inspection
within different sectors enhances the extent to which the findings of in-depth study of accreditation process in one industry can
be generalised to other industries. This paper presents a research design which comprises a prospective, multi-method, multilevel,
multi-disciplinary approach to assess the validity, impact and value of accreditation.
Discussion: The accreditation program which assesses over 1,000 health services in Australia is used as an exemplar for testing
this design. The paper proposes this design as a framework suitable for application to future international research into
accreditation. Our aim is to stimulate debate on the role of accreditation and how to research it.
