SEQOHS accreditation: what it means when you hire OH staff
If you buy occupational health services, you'll see SEQOHS mentioned on almost every provider's website. Here's what it actually means, in plain English.
What SEQOHS is
SEQOHS — Safe, Effective, Quality Occupational Health Services — is the voluntary accreditation scheme for occupational health services, run by the Royal College of Physicians' Faculty of Occupational Medicine. It assesses an OH service against standards covering clinical governance, staffing and qualifications, facilities, records management and the way the service relates to its customers and workers.
Accreditation involves evidence submission and assessment, and services are reassessed on a cycle — it's not a one-off badge.
What it tells you
A SEQOHS-accredited provider has demonstrated its processes, governance and record-keeping meet a recognised external standard. For buyers, it's a genuinely useful filter: it removes a lot of due-diligence work you'd otherwise have to do yourself, and many public-sector contracts expect it.
What it doesn't tell you
Accreditation applies to the service, not to each individual clinician's calibre or to how well the service will fit your business. A SEQOHS provider can still be a poor fit for your sector, your locations, or your turnaround expectations — and an excellent small OH service may not have pursued accreditation at all because of the cost and administration involved.
Questions worth asking any OH provider
- Who will actually deliver our service day-to-day, and what are their qualifications?
- What are your report turnaround times, and what happens when you miss them?
- How do you handle clinical governance and audit?
- Can we speak to two customers of a similar size and sector?
Where we fit
We're a recruitment agency rather than an OH provider — we staff OH services, both accredited providers and in-house teams. If you're building in-house OH capability and weighing that against outsourcing to a provider, we're happy to talk through what the staffing side really costs, with no obligation.