EquIP accreditation: feedback from a Sydney teaching hospital.

The Australian Council on Healthcare Standards' new Evaluation and Quality Improvement Program (EQuIP) accreditation model reflects the worldwide trend towards incorporating continuous quality improvement and patient-focused care goals into hospital/health service accreditation. We conducted a post-EQuIP feedback survey among senior clinical and managerial staff at a Sydney teaching hospital and identified significant levels of negative feedback among respondents. Principal concerns were related to perceptions that the process was unnecessarily unwieldy and that it offered little value in terms of patient care delivery for the significant amount of human resources it consumed.