Accreditation of inpatient mental health services

This chapter outlines how a programme of accreditation can help improve the standards of care on inpatient units by describing the Accreditation for Inpatient Mental Health Services (AIMS). The development of and need for accreditation are outlined with evidence of how accreditation adds value to the process of audit. There is a discussion of how data obtained from national audits of inpatient care and accreditation have been used to describe the quality of inpatient mental health services. There follows a report of the local use of the accreditation programme for an acute mental health inpatient ward for men in Oxford. Finally, some key standards are provided in order to describe what a high-quality inpatient unit may look like.