National Health Service Care Standard

Clinical research in the UK is governed by statutory requirements in the form of the EU Directive (2001/20/EC) on Good Clinical Practice (GCP), ethical principles (Declaration of Helsinki), the Research Governance Eramework for Health and Social Care (Department of Health, 2005) and the duty of care in the National Health Service (NHS), the high professional and ethical standards that most care professionals and researchers uphold. 

The Council is composed of 17 national organizations and agencies, representative of health professions, licensing boards, health care facilities, pharmaceutical manufacturers, regulators, standards setters, and others (Table 1). The membership of the NCC MERP is interdisciplinary and represents crossfunctional groups in the delivery of health eare products and services. USP is a founding member and Secretariat to the Couneil. 

National Fire Protection Association has the objective of developing, publishing, and disseminating standards intended to minimize the possibility and effect of fire and explosion. NFPA s membership consists of individuals from business and industry, fire service, health care, insurance, educational, and government institutions. NFPA conducts fire safety education programs for the general public and provides information on fire protection and prevention. Also provided by the association is the field service by specialists on flammable liquids, electricity, gases, and marine problems. 

Since the early 1980s, there has been a more than fivefold increase in the number of Americans enrolled in HMOs, which has had a dramatic impact on the delivery of healthcare in the United States. As a result of this trend, HMOs realized the need to demonstrate the quality of care they provided to their members compared with fee-for-service health plans however, at the time the industry lacked established standards. Subsequently, various independent review processes evolved, which often did not have consistent assumptions about the parameters that defined quality. It was not until the late 1980s that a group of HMO industry leaders recognized that an organization called the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) had the potential to act as an independent authority on quality control in managed care. ... 

Based on my years of health care engineering and system troubleshooting experience, I ve always been aware that many hospitals do not hold their HVAC systems up to the standards set by the pharmaceutical industry. What I have recently learned is that 1C within medical facilities does not always achieve the same quality control standards as the pharmaceutical industry, either. Many in the health care industry may dispute my assessment, but my partnering physician has referred me to enough articles (e.g., Adverse Events in Hospitals National Incidence Among Medical Beneficiaries, Department of Heath and Human Services, November 2010) supporting the concerns with IC that include and go well beyond the HVAC systems. 

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