In short: DocHelp prepares healthcare services for accreditation against the National Safety and Quality Primary and Community Healthcare (NSQPCH) Standards with QIP — three standards, 65 actions — for services that fall outside the RACGP Standards for general practices. Melbourne and Australia-wide.
If an agency has told you the RACGP Standards don’t fit your service, that is not the end of the conversation. It is the start of a different one. The NSQPCH Standards were written for services that deliver care in a primary or community setting whatever their size or scope — and we prepare services for them the same way we prepare general practices for the RACGP Standards.
NSQPCH · QIP · Dental · Specialist & procedural clinics · Allied health
The RACGP Standards for general practices are built on comprehensive, continuing general practice care. Every criterion assumes it — the usual doctor, the ongoing relationship, the whole-of-patient record. That is a reasonable assumption for a general practice and an impossible one for a clinic that does one thing well.
So a vasectomy clinic, a skin and minor surgery clinic, a nurse-led service, a dental practice or an allied health provider can be run beautifully and still be told, correctly, that the RACGP Standards cannot be applied to it. That is not a judgement about quality. It is a mismatch of framework.
The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care published the NSQPCH Standards to close exactly that gap. They apply to services delivering health care in a primary and/or community setting that “vary in size and modes of delivery and are carried out by a diverse range of healthcare providers”. Small is not a problem. Narrow is not a problem. The Standards ask whether the systems exist and are in use, sized honestly to the service.
There are no core and developmental tiers under NSQPCH. Each action is rated Met, Met with recommendations, or Not met, and every applicable action must be Met or Met with recommendations for accreditation to be awarded.
25 actions · 1.01–1.25. Governance, leadership and culture. Policies and procedures. Risk, incidents and complaints. Quality improvement. Credentialling and scope of clinical practice. Patient records, results and follow-up. Workforce training and supervision.
8 actions · 2.01–2.08. Health literacy and communication. Informed consent. Capacity and substitute decision-making. Shared decision-making. Involving patients and carers in the design and review of the service itself, not just their own care.
32 actions · 3.01–3.32. The largest standard. Infection prevention and control, aseptic technique, invasive devices and reprocessing. Antimicrobial stewardship and medication safety. Comprehensive care, recognising and responding to deterioration, communicating critical information.
The Commission draws one clear line: organisations providing consultancy or indirect services, without direct patient care, cannot be assessed against these Standards. Almost everything else is in scope.
| Service type | Typical situation | Framework |
|---|---|---|
| General practice | Comprehensive continuing care, MyMedicare, PIP | RACGP Standards (or NSQPCH by choice) |
| Private dental practice | Voluntary accreditation, registered through the ADA | NSQPCH — see the dental page |
| Specialist & single-purpose clinics | Vasectomy, family planning, skin and minor surgery, women’s and men’s health | NSQPCH — see the specialist page |
| Allied health | Physiotherapy, podiatry, audiology, speech pathology, psychology | NSQPCH |
| Nurse-led and bush nursing services | Nurse practitioner clinics, rural nursing practices | NSQPCH |
| Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health services | Community controlled health organisations | NSQPCH |
| Community and NGO health services | Ambulatory palliative care, community programs, PHN-funded services | NSQPCH |
| Consultancy or indirect services | No direct patient care | Not eligible |
A note on choosing. A general practice that also runs a distinct non-general-practice service sometimes needs to think carefully about which framework covers what. We work in both — the RACGP Standards with AGPAL, QPA and QIP, and the NSQPCH Standards with QIP — so the advice you get is about your service, not about the only framework we happen to know.
QIP is an approved accrediting agency under the Australian Health Service Safety and Quality Accreditation Scheme. Its process for NSQPCH is a self-assessment you complete and evidence in AccreditationPro, an evidence check before a date is set, then the assessment itself.
We map your service against all 65 actions and tell you where you actually stand. This is also where any not-applicable application gets decided, because it has to be applied for well before assessment.
Policies, procedures, registers and logs written to describe your service by name, with the people who actually work in it. Generic downloaded policy packs are the most common cause of a Not met rating.
We work through AccreditationPro with you, action by action, uploading evidence as it is finished rather than in one panic at the end. Submission triggers QIP’s own evidence check before a date is allocated.
Mock interviews with every staff member, clinical and non-clinical, before the day. If anything comes back Not met there is a remediation period and a secondary review — we work that too.
| Milestone | Timing | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Self-assessment opens | On payment of the initial accreditation invoice | AccreditationPro becomes available |
| Self-assessment submitted | QIP recommends 4 months before expiry | All evidence uploaded, declaration signed; triggers QIP’s evidence check |
| Assessment | Due 6 months before expiry | Dates set with you; an agenda is provided beforehand |
| Preliminary report | Within 5 business days | Lists any non-compliances found |
| Remediation | 60 business days | Only if actions are rated Not met; evidence goes to secondary review |
| Decision and certificate | Within 2 business days of the decision | Certificate, accreditation report and marketing resources issued |
Read those two dates together, because they catch people out: the assessment is due six months before expiry and the recommended submission is four. In practice you need the self-assessment finished and evidenced well before the recommended date, not on it. Work backwards from your expiry date, not forwards from today.
None of these are about being a large service. They are about knowing which rules bind the assessor.
Only a short closed list of actions can ever be rated not applicable, and a separate list applies to private dental practices. Exclusions must be applied for in advance with evidence that the action carries little or no risk of harm in your context, determined before assessment, and verified on the day. Nine actions are conditionally worded — but read the wording, because most small clinics still trigger them.
If you reprocess any reusable critical or semi-critical device, Action 3.13 applies in full and a Commission advisory sets hard rating rules around a gap analysis against AS 5369:2023, which superseded AS/NZS 4815:2006 and AS/NZS 4187:2014. This is a months-long piece of work, not a weekend one. Decide early and definitively whether you reprocess anything at all.
The Guide says the same thing under nearly every action: the type and comprehensiveness of evidence depends on the service’s context and size. A policy describing committees that never meet and roles nobody holds gets rated Not met, because the action asks whether the system is in use. Documents have to describe your clinic, by name, with your people.
Commission advisories are mandatory for accrediting agencies to implement. An advisory changes how an action is rated and beats both general guidance and the Guide itself. We check the advisory list before every assessment, because one published between your self-assessment and your assessment day still binds the assessor.
Fifteen years of accreditation work and a hundred per cent pass rate came from general practice, and the method transfers: find the gaps honestly, build evidence that describes the real service, rehearse the interviews, and be there on the day.
What does not transfer is the content. NSQPCH has its own numbering, its own evidence expectations and its own advisories, so we keep it as a separate practice with a separate knowledge base rather than bending RACGP material to fit. Citing an RACGP criterion in an NSQPCH self-assessment is a fast way to lose an assessor’s confidence.
The National Safety and Quality Primary and Community Healthcare Standards, written by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care and launched in October 2021. They cover any service delivering health care in a primary or community setting, whatever its size or mode of delivery. There are three standards — Clinical Governance, Partnering with Consumers, and Clinical Safety — and 65 actions in total.
Primary health care centres, community health services, general practices, allied health, dental practices, mental health services, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health services, Primary Health Networks, community organisations and NGOs, rural and remote services, nurse-led clinics, and single-purpose procedural clinics. The Commission's one clear exclusion is organisations providing consultancy or indirect services without direct patient care — they are not eligible.
The RACGP Standards for general practices assume comprehensive, continuing general practice care, and AGPAL and QPA assess against them. The NSQPCH Standards make no such assumption, which is why a service that is not a general practice can be accredited under NSQPCH when it cannot be under the RACGP Standards. Different framework, different agency, different numbering. They are not interchangeable and evidence built for one does not transfer cleanly to the other.
For most services it is voluntary, but a regulator, funder, insurer or contract can make it a condition. Many services also pursue it because it is the only credible accreditation available to them, and because tenders and referrers increasingly ask for it.
QIP issues certificates valid for two or three years depending on the assessment model — desktop, desktop plus virtual, desktop plus on-site, or a model stipulated by a regulator.
Only a small closed list, and only with evidence. The Commission's advisory on not applicable actions names ten actions that may ever be excluded, and a separate advisory sets a different list for private dental practices. Everything else applies to every accredited service. Any exclusion has to be applied for in advance, determined by the agency before assessment, and verified by the assessor on the day. Assuming an action does not apply, and finding out at assessment that it does, is one of the most common ways a service fails.
Met, Met with recommendations, or Not met. There are no core and developmental tiers as there are under some other frameworks — every applicable action has to be Met or Met with recommendations for accreditation to be awarded. If anything is Not met there is a remediation period, then a secondary review before the decision.
Yes. Most of an NSQPCH build is document and systems work that runs remotely, with on-site or virtual time for the assessment itself. We are Melbourne-based and travel for on-site work.
Requirements and advisories change. Everything on this page reflects the position as we understood it in August 2026, from the Commission’s published Standards and advisories and QIP’s own process documents. We re-check before every assessment, and so should you.