The Trent Accreditation Scheme (TAS), now replaced de facto by a number of independent accreditation schemes, such as the QHA Trent Accreditation, was a British accreditation scheme formed with a mission to maintain and continually evaluate standards of quality, especially in health care delivery, through the surveying and accreditation of health care organisations, especially hospitals and clinics, both in the UK and elsewhere in the world.
The Trent UK Accreditation Scheme, or TAS UK, ceased to operate in May 2010, when a majority of Board members decided to end the scheme.
Subsequently, a number of independent accreditation schemes were set up, including the British-based scheme QHA Trent Accreditation.
History of the scheme
Trent's basic mission resembled that of the USA's Joint Commission International, or JCI, and other major international healthcare accreditation groups, although there were some significant differences in the way the different groups worked.
Apart from hospitals in the United Kingdom, Trent also surveyed a large number of private sector hospitals in Hong Kong. and at the time of its demise had been developing links with hospitals in Cyprus.
The approach Trent took to Clinic and Hospital Accreditation was based on the axiom that no single healthcare system, whether European, American, Asian or otherwise in origin, has the right to claim a monopoly viewpoint over what represents acceptable quality and best clinical practice throughout the world, and no one country has the absolute right to tell another how their hospitals should be run. What is vital is that the quality of care which patients receive should be of the highest possible standard, and also that the hospitals and clinics providing that care should be independently capable when it comes to working out how best to maintain those standards and how best to respond to any new challenges which will inevitably come along. If the overall standards of a hospital or clinic can be shown to be of acceptable quality, then it is desirable, and even ideal, that local differences related to culture and to legislation should be specifically discussed and incorporated into the assessment standards in an appropriate fashion. That said, Trent was very interested in the medical ethical standards of the hospitals it worked with.
To achieve all of this, Trent worked in close partnership with participating hospitals and clinics to generate an appropriate and mutually acceptable set of standards to survey against. Because the world of healthcare is constantly changing, the standards were constantly reviewed and up-dated through a system of working jointly with representatives of partner hospitals.
Trent developed various ways to ensure local participation, and even ownership, over the accreditation process in a locality. Trent utilised UK-sourced surveyors who were either working in the British National Health Service, or NHS, or had retired in recent times, and hence have valuable experience and insight "at the coal face", and in Hong Kong Trent also appoints locally domiciled surveyors (see later). Trent surveyors are drawn from a wide variety of professional backgrounds, but especially from the worlds of medicine, dentistry, nursing, the professions complementary to medicine (e.g. physiotherapy, pharmacy etc.) and healthcare management/administration, so as to ensure an appropriately broad portfolio of knowledge and skills are always present within the surveying teams and the wider organisation. Surveyors were all volunteer professionals rather than salaried employees.
Trent surveys were not just a matter of working through a “tick-list” of standards, a process which Trent believed might elevate standards to a certain level but nevertheless do little to inculcate a culture of “thinking for oneself” – instead, Trent surveys involved direct face-to-face conversation with all levels of staff, including clinical medical staff and senior management (for this reason, qualified medical doctors are included in all surveying teams organised by Trent) and Trent surveyors expected full freedom to go anywhere in the hospital or clinic under survey and to talk to anyone they choose to. Discussion and analysis of the data thus generated, not only by the Trent team but also by the hospital or clinic under survey, represented a major component of Trent's approach to hospital and clinic accreditation, and reflected an underlying philosophy that the whole process was about improving services to patients and the ability of an organisation to work effectively towards that aim.