Highlighting efficiency and redundancy in the Royal Australian College of General Practice standards for accreditation

Objectives. Accreditation to standards developed by the Royal Australian Collage of General Practice provide assurance to the community to the quality of safety of general practices in Australia. Minimal empirically driven evaluation of the current 5th edition standards has been conducted since their publication in 2020. Methods. Data encompass consecutive Australian general practice accreditation assessments made between December 2020 and July 2022 recorded from a single accrediting agency. Met and not met compliance (binary) scores for 124 indicators evaluated at the site visit were recorded. A subset of indicators derived from a selection of existing and consistently non-conformant indicators within each criterion were generated. Concordance between the indicator subset set and the criterion was assessed to determine the predictive ability of the indicator subset in distinguishing practices who are conformant to the entire criterion. Results. N=757 general practices were included in the analysis. On average, 113.69 (SD=8.16) of 124 indicators were evaluated as conformant at the site visit. In total, 52 (42%) indicators were required to obtain a true positive conformity rate above 95% for all criterions of the standards. For criterion 1 (General Practice 1) conformity to the entire criterion (9 indicators; >95% true positive rate) could be obtained by including 2/9 indicators (C1-1a and C1-2a). Conclusion. Our results identified indicator non-conformity was driven by a small proportion of indicators and identifying a subset of these consistently non-conformant indicators predicted a true positive rate above 95% at the criterion level.<p></p>