The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners

CORNERSTONE® offers three programmes for general practices to gain and maintain accreditation.

Information can be found in our booklet:

The Accreditation Programme for General Practice in New Zealand

Entry Level

Practices can enter the CORNERSTONE programme and work to be accredited over a period of 12 months. The practice must be externally assessed and meet all the mandatory criteria in Aiming for Excellence 2011-2014 before certification is considered.

Accreditation is awarded on the recommendation of Health and Disability Auditing New Zealand Limited (HDANZ), the designated audit agency.

Annual Programme

Once accredited, practices are eligible to move into an annual maintenance programme. The annual programme is based on a 4 year cycle. The annual programme assists the practice to embed continuous quality improvement into everyday process and ‘business as usual’.

Each year a practice will participate in an ongoing cycle of assurance and quality improvement activities including the completion of:

• mandatory criteria
• regionally selected or practice selected criteria
• one quality improvement activity targeted at clinical care
• one audit of the practice’s choice (this may be non clinical)

To retain an accredited status the practice must complete all the annual activities each year and upload evidence into Geethal Data Systems Limited, a software programme designed to deliver the CORNERSTONE programme.

The practice will then be externally assessed once every four years.

Health and Disability Auditing New Zealand Limited (HDANZ) provide external validation of the accreditation process.

Expired Accreditation

Practices with an expired CORNERSTONE certificate can enter the Entry Level programme and work to be re-accredited over a period of 12 months. As with the Entry Level programme, the practice must be externally assessed and meet all the mandatory criteria in Aiming for Excellence 2011-2014 before re-certification is considered. Following re-accreditation, the practice will move to the annual maintenance programme.

Accreditation is awarded on the recommendation of Health and Disability Auditing New Zealand Limited (HDANZ), the designated audit agency.

Eligibility

In order to participate in the CORNERSTONE General Practice Accreditation Programme the primary health care facility must meet the definition of a general practice.

Costs

All CORNERSTONE programmes are self funded. For detailed information on the cost to practices, please contact the QI Coordinator.