We encourage and facilitate the process of Quality Assurance activities, as they are essential for improving health services and patient outcomes.
Quality Assurance is defined by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) as:
"An activity where the primary purpose is to monitor or improve the quality of service delivered by an individual or an organisation."
Terms such as ‘peer review’, ‘quality assurance’, ‘quality improvement’, ‘quality activities’, ‘quality studies’ and ‘audit’ are often used interchangeably. In this document, the term ‘quality assurance’ is used to include all of these terms.
The NHMRC document – ethical considerations in quality assurance and evaluation activities – gives more information about oversight and review of these activities.
Quality Assurance activities aim to gain information on specific services to create better outcomes and more effective processes.
They may involve patients, staff, or members of the community. Therefore, it is important for Quality Assurance activities to be run with ethical consideration of those involved.
Quality Assurance activities must be begun by a Grampians Health Principal Investigator. Any applications started by an external principal investigator are not considered Quality Assurance.
Please use the submission pathway checklist to find out if your project is suitable for QA review.
Related information
Quality assurance (QA) and evaluation are important to ensure effective work and the best outcomes. However, confusion arises over if an activity is research, evaluation or QA as there may be similar research methods used.
Please refer to the document link which will assist organisations in developing QA policy and appropriate oversight.
Process of review
The following essential documents are required for ethical review.
- Download and complete the Quality Assurance/Negligible Risk Research Project Plan and submit via ERM.
- Supporting documentation: all documents must be uploaded within the QA ERM Application
Upload the completed /signed documents into ERM
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