December/January 2021/2022 (vol. 18/4)

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ONLINE FIRST: Quality assured?

The origins and development of SEQOHS

Summary:

Ten years after the first providers achieved Safe Effective Quality Occupational Health Services (SEQOHS) accreditation, occupational physician Paul Nicholson, who led the development of SEQOHS, describes how it came about and shares his thoughts on its progress and future.

The story of Safe Effective Quality Occupational Health Services (SEQOHS) starts many years before the launch of the standards in 2010; the two preceding decades witnessed pockets of interest in external certification to demonstrate the quality of occupational health (OH) services and the growth of the quality movement in healthcare. Those developments and experiences informed the concept, design and development of SEQOHS.

Quality management standards
In 1979, the British Standards Institution (BSI) launched its quality management British Standard (BS) 5750; this focused on the quality of manufactured products (‘tangible deliverables’)…

 

Dr Paul Nicholson is an occupational physician, past president of the Society of Occupational Medicine and past chair of the BMA Occupational Medicine Committee. He was the Faculty of Occupational Medicine’s clinical lead responsible for designing, developing and delivering the SEQOHS standards and accreditation scheme.

Author: Nicholson P

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Occupational Health at Work December/January 2021/2022 (vol. 18/4) pp29-35

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