section_path: Quality and safety
section_name: Quality and safety
paragraph_text: Quality and safety
  
  As the quality of health care has increasingly become an issue around the world, hospitals have increasingly had to pay serious attention to this matter. Independent external assessment of quality is one of the most powerful ways to assess this aspect of health care, and hospital accreditation is one means by which this is achieved. In many parts of the world such accreditation is sourced from other countries, a phenomenon known as international healthcare accreditation, by groups such as Accreditation Canada in Canada, the Joint Commission in the U.S., the Trent Accreditation Scheme in Great Britain, and the Haute Autorité de santé (HAS) in France. In England, hospitals are monitored by the Care Quality Commission. In 2020, they turned their attention to hospital food standards after seven patient deaths from listeria linked to pre-packaged sandwiches and salads in 2019, saying "Nutrition and hydration is part of a patient's recovery."
  
  The World Health Organization reported in 2011 that being admitted to a hospital was far riskier than flying. Globally, the chance of a patient being subject to a treatment error in a hospital was about 10%, and the chance of death resulting from an error was about one in 300. according to Liam Donaldson. 7% of hospitalised patients in developed countries, and 10% in developing countries, acquire at least one health care-associated infection. In the U.S., 1.7 million infections are acquired in hospital each year, leading to 100,000 deaths, figures much worse than in Europe where there were 4.5 million infections and 37,000 deaths.