an organization · AustraliaACHS International

The international subsidiary of the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards, a not-for-profit that has developed healthcare standards since 1974 and is an authorised accrediting agency of the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care. ACHS International is wholly owned by that parent and sells accreditation, standards, benchmarking and advisory services outside Australia, using the EQuIP standards.

ACHS is a domestic regulator's partner at home and a vendor abroad, and the two roles sit in one corporate group. At home the standards are part of a national safety and quality system a hospital cannot opt out of. Abroad the same standards are a product a hospital buys.

Inference — that is the pattern for every national scheme on this list that went international — the Australian, the Indian, the Thai, the American. The standards were written for a system with a regulator behind them and are then sold into systems where nothing stands behind them but the contract. The mark is the same; what it is embedded in is not.

The EQuIP standards hold an ISQua EEA award, which is the external check on the standards themselves.

An organisation contracts with ACHS International, is assessed against EQuIP or a sector variant — hospitals, ambulatory care, telehealth, oral health, dialysis — and joins its member network. The pages read for this record state neither the cycle length nor whether the accredited list is public.

As of 16 September 2026 ACHS International states it operates in more than 25 countries with more than 1,600 member organisations worldwide.