International healthcare accreditation

Due to the near-universal desire for safe and good quality healthcare, there is a growing interest in international healthcare accreditation. Providing healthcare, especially of an adequate standard, is a complex and challenging process. Healthcare is a vital and emotive issue—its importance pervades all aspects of societies, and it has medical, social, political, ethical, business, and financial ramifications. In any part of the world healthcare services can be provided either by the public sector or by the private sector, or by a combination of both, and the site of delivery of healthcare can be located in hospitals or be accessed through practitioners working in the community, such as general medical practitioners and dentists.

This is occurring in most parts of the developed world in a setting in which people are expressing ever-greater expectations of hospitals and healthcare services. This trend is especially strong where socialised medical systems exist. For example, in the European Union "... patients have ever-greater expectations of what health systems ought to deliver," although there has been a "... continuous rise in costs of services determined by scientific and technological innovation." And in one particular EU member state, the United Kingdom, "... People are going to increase demand and they have also got an increased expectation of what the NHS can deliver." The USA manifests some differences here, and is an unusual and distinct oddity among developed Western countries. In 2007, 45.7 million of the overall US population (i.e. 15.3%) had no health insurance whatsoever yet in 2007 the USA spent nearly $2.3 trillion on healthcare, or 16% of the country's gross domestic product, more than twice as much per capita as the OECD average. Because of this, some US citizens are having to look outside of their country to find affordable healthcare, through the medium of medical tourism, also known as "Global Healthcare" (see below).

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