Introduction to proactive quality assurance

Promoting excellence: standards for medical education and training sets our standards for providers of medical education and training.

We regularly check that these standards are being met. We do this in two main ways: proactive and reactive quality assurance.

Proactive quality assurance is where we actively check medical schools and postgraduate training organisations to make sure they are meeting our standards. The model is a risk-based continuous cycle of quality assurance over four years. It aims to be a flexible and collaborative approach to the quality assurance of the organisations we work with, giving us assurance of their quality management processes on a proportionate scale.

The proactive quality assurance model

The model is based on a cycle whereby medical schools and postgraduate training organisations declare, once every four years, that they meet our standards.

Between declarations on an annual basis we will:

• Ask every organisation for an annual self-assessment questionnaire.
• Triangulate our data and intelligence alongside the organisation's self-assessment questionnaire to give us further evidence of how an organisation is meeting our standards - examples of this data could be national training survey results, or enhanced monitoring cases.
• Have multiple feedback meetings with each organisation to report on self-assessment questionnaire analysis and discuss the annual quality assurance summary.
• Complete regulatory quality assurance activity to further explore areas of good practice, excellence or risk.
• Produce an annual quality assurance summary including an overall regulatory statement and next steps.

View the self-assessment questionnaires and annual quality assurance summaries.

The proactive quality assurance cycle