The role of organizational licensing in healthcare.

Much has been written about organizational accreditation in healthcare, but little attention has been paid to licensing providers as a means to control quality in the provision of health and social care. Licensing has a variety of different applications but frequently involves a mandatory assessment against standards. This paper reports on a comparison of the various ways in which the basic requirements for quality are framed in a range of licensing systems and concludes that there are considerable similarities in the approach to quality used across both health and social care licensing systems in many countries.