The standards were set up by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care (ACSQHC) to drive care of a uniformly high quality across the country. They are applied to all hospitals (private and public, across all states), covering ten priority areas including quality governance, hospital-acquired infection, medication safety and clinical handover (see Box 2.5 for further detail). There has been broad agreement from stakeholders that the new standards are a positive move forward, promoting greater clinical involvement and more directly addressing specific quality issues than other standards.