Established through the Health Professions Act: Bylaws of the College of Physicians and Surgeons Part 5 Section B., the Diagnostic Accreditation Program fuflills its mandate of promoting excellence in diagnostic health care by:
- Establishing performance standards that are consistent with professional knowledge to ensure the delivery of safe, high quality diagnostic service;
- Evaluating a diagnostic service’s level of actual performance to achieving the performance standards;
- Establishing a comparative database of health care organizations, and their performance to selected structure, process, and outcome standards or criteria;
- Monitoring the performance of organizations through the establishment of proficiency testing programs and other robust quality indicators of performance;
- Providing education and consultation to health care organizations, managers, and health professionals on quality improvement strategies and "best practices" in diagnostic health care;
- Ensuring information learned from accreditation processes is used for system wide improvement;
- Reporting to government, stakeholders and the public the performance of the diagnostic health care system as assessed through accreditation;
- Strengthening the public's confidence in the quality of diagnostic health care;
- Assisting organizations to reduce risks and increase safety for patients and staff;
- Assisting organizations to reduce health care costs by promoting quality practices that increase efficiency and effectiveness of services; and
- Serving and safeguarding the public
Services and Core Functions:
The DAP services are designed and delivered to capture the benefits of peer review, knowledge sharing and professional support. The DAP operates on a continuous quality improvement model rather than an inspectorial and strict enforcement of compliance basis, and remains highly committed to supportive, peer-based approaches to accreditation that foster the development of CQI cultures within the diagnostic services.
Core Functions
- Establishing accreditation programs targeted at specific health care services:
- Establishing optimal achievement goals, standards, criteria and requirements
- Establishing programs for surveyor training and development:
- Selecting skilled and appropriate surveyors
- Providing orientation and training to surveyors
- Evaluating and developing surveyor performance
- Ensuring consistency of surveyors
- Establishing processes of accreditation:
- Survey management - survey planning and self assessment
- Setting the basis and criteria for awarding levels of accreditation
- Timely determination of accreditation decisions
- Establishing the duration and maintenance of accreditation
- Establishing a process for appeal of accreditation decision
- Reporting accreditation status of organizations to the public
- Establishing research and development, and education programs:
- Generating and transferring new knowledge gained through the accreditation processes
- Continuous evaluation of existing DAP accreditation programs for relevancy, effectiveness and appropriateness
- Identifying the need and requirement for new accreditation programs, standards and/or criteria
- Collecting, analyzing, comparing, and publishing data, and providing feedback on the performance of diagnostic services
- Resource centre for quality improvement standards, methods and experience, and as a focal point for the collection of local information, as well as for comparisons with other provinces and countries.
- Monitoring performance of organizations:
- Selecting and mandating proficiency testing programs;
- Establishing new proficiency testing programs or approaches to monitoring performance when there is no existing program available;
- Developing and monitoring robust quality indicators of performance