MEDICAL IMAGING AND PACS
More about ISAS The ISAS Standard promotes best practice by comprehensively addressing patient experience, clinical effectiveness, patient and staff safety, and efficient use of resources.
Jointly owned by The College of Radiographers and The Royal College of Radiologists, it was specifically developed for UK organisations providing diagnostic imaging services, to both within the NHS and private sector. To ensure impartiality of the scheme, the Colleges licensed UKAS to manage and deliver ISAS on their behalf.
The United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) is the sole national body recognised by government to assess evaluating organisations to international standards. UKAS operates under a memorandum of understanding with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), and is a non-profit-distributing company limited by guarantee.
UKAS accreditation involves assessment and verification (against international standards) of certification, inspection, testing and calibration activities. UKAS employs over 300 assessors and technical experts, and has over 40 years’ experience.
If the visiting team identify areas where investment is required to achieve a satisfactory standard, that may of itself be useful evidence in generating the necessary business case. Patients will not only have a better and safer experience of our service – benefiting from the improvements required in all areas to achieve the standard – but will also have assurance that this will be so.
ISAS accreditation also gives us evidence for our commissioners that we deliver high quality patient focussed services, as we persuade them to continue to commission our services. This will be more important as the DH extends the concept of ‘any qualified provider’ able to compete for diagnostic service provision in the coming years.
The trust also benefits from knowledge that we have been carefully scrutinised and not found wanting, and the award is a source of pride for all. Ultimately it will be a risk not to have achieved ISAS accreditation, as it will imply that certain important standards have not been met in that organisation.
There is a possibility in the future that ISAS accreditation will attract a best practise tariff, though this is yet to be confirmed.
The benefits of a successful accreditation scheme to the wider NHS and the DH
are manifold. As take up spreads,
quality
improvements will be driven across the NHS. As ISAS accreditation becomes the normal state, trusts failing to reach a good standard will be more easily identified.
The process provides a form of benchmarking of quality of imaging services across a wide range of patient focussed parameters, something that has been hard to achieve nationally by simple number counting. With the advent of the new imaging dataset this year, and the future ability to cross reference with other clinical data, it may ultimately be possible to use the process to drive whole system changes to promote quality; for example by limiting accreditation to organisations that meet specified national targets such as the imaging components of the stroke strategy.
In summary, ISAS accreditation provides evidence for commissioners, providers and patients that an imaging service is safe and high quality.
The process itself will promulgate service improvement in individual organisations, and should become a national quality driver.
FOR MORE INFORMATION W:
www.isas-uk.org
Dr Graham Hoadley
national health executive Jul/Aug 12 | 57
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