Around 80 per cent of General Practices in Australia undergo accreditation. The process requires practices to be assessed against the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) Standards (5^th edition) by an independent third party at least every three years, to gain ‘accredited’ status.

Accreditation uses a peer review model where surveyors must be actively involved in General Practice (including in the areas of practice management) and where at least one of the visiting surveyors is a general practitioner.

The RACGP states that achieving accreditation shows patients that your practice is committed to providing high quality, safe and effective care as determined by the general practice profession.

Please note, the definition of a general practice's eligibility to become RACGP accredited, has changed to include some non-traditional general practices. This change enables more non-traditional practices to register with MyMedicare. Please refer to this guide to check if your non-traditional general practice is now eligible.

Why become accredited?

There are many benefits to becoming an accredited General Practice. Some of these include:

• Recognition within the general practice community that your clinic is performing in accordance to best practice standards
• Proven framework for Quality Improvement and Quality Assurance in General Practice
• Improving practice efficiency and the practice environment
• Measure how the practice is performing in relation to general practice benchmarks
• The opportunity to reflect on what’s working well at a practice level and identify areas for improvement
• Access funding from the Practice Incentives Program (PIP) and the Workforce Incentive Payment (WIP).

Accreditation agencies

These organisations often allocate a support contact to practices undergoing accreditation with them. Make sure you contact your support contact so you can learn about additional resources, support services and information these organisations may offer.

As the RACGP Standards are comprehensive, it is unlikely that all components will be reviewed during the three-yearly accreditation visit. However, your accreditation provider will provide a checklist of areas that are considered essential that are always checked as part of the accreditation visit. You should use this checklist to review what procedures or documentation you may still need to compile to be ready for your survey visit. You can also allocate the responsibility for certain activities to different staff in your practice.

The following agencies are approved to assess general practices to the RACGP Standards for general practices.

Essential components of accreditation