Accreditation can play an important role in communicating quality information to collective and individual purchasers and increasing efficiency in the health sector. When sufficiently widespread, accreditation serves to increase the overall quality of the health sector by providing both information on quality and feedback on structures necessary to achieve quality in a form that promotes benchmarking and internal organisation improvements. Such a scheme can benefit poorer users as well as richer ones. Accreditation programmes improve quality in a number of ways, building upon existing organisational strengths. Strong management, motivated staff, community awareness and ‘buy-in’ to the process at all levels have been shown to be critical in achieving and retaining the quality improvements associated with meeting programmes standards.