Getting Your GP Practice Accredited: A Cleaning Timeline for Melbourne Practice Managers

Accreditation is voluntary for an Australian general practice, but very few practices treat it that way. Without it, a practice cannot receive Practice Incentives Program payments, and patients, registrars and new GPs increasingly expect it. Cleaning is a small part of the assessment, but it is one of the easiest places to lose marks for reasons that have nothing to do with how clean the practice is. This is a plan for getting that part right.

How accreditation works

General practices are accredited under the National General Practice Accreditation (NGPA) Scheme, run by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care with the RACGP. A practice chooses an approved accrediting agency, AGPAL being the best known, and is assessed against the RACGP Standards for general practices.

Each cycle runs for three years and usually involves:

1. an online self-assessment, with documents uploaded as evidence
2. an on-site visit from a surveyor team, who walks the practice, reads the policies and talks to staff
3. actions to close any criteria not met, with a deadline
4. continuous improvement through the rest of the cycle

The 6th edition of the Standards was released on 26 August 2026. For a transition period practices can be assessed against either edition; your agency will tell you which applies. The cleaning requirements are covered in what the RACGP Standards ask of your cleaning.

What the surveyor will look at

On cleaning, the surveyor is mostly testing whether your system is real. Expect them to:

• ask to see the cleaning policy and schedule, and check it covers every area, clinical and non-clinical
• compare the schedule with the building. A schedule that lists rooms you no longer have, or misses the new treatment room, says it is not used.
• ask who is responsible for each task, and whether the cleaner knows
• ask for evidence the schedule was followed: records, audits, inspection reports
• look at the rooms. Dust on high ledges, scuffed skirting, a stained couch base, an overflowing general bin next to a clinical one
• open the cleaner's cupboard. Labelled products, safety data sheets, colour-coded equipment stored dry, nothing decanted into an unlabelled spray bottle
• talk to staff about spills, the spill kit, and who cleans what between patients

None of that is hard if the system has been running all along. All of it is hard to manufacture in the last fortnight.

A six-month plan

Six months out: check the paperwork against reality

• Pull out the cleaning policy and schedule. Check the date; if it pre-dates the RACGP's 2022 infection prevention and control guidelines, it needs rewriting. Our policy and schedule guide walks through it.
• Walk the practice with the schedule in hand, room by room. Add what is missing, remove what is gone.
• Ask your cleaner for their product list and current safety data sheets.
• Confirm in writing what the cleaner does and what your clinical team does. The line between them is where surveyors find gaps.

Four months out: make sure the records exist

• Find out what records your cleaner keeps and how you can see them. If the answer is "a sign-off sheet in the cleaner's cupboard", collect it monthly.
• Start a simple monthly audit: one walk-through, a scored checklist, two or three photos, actions noted. It takes the practice manager half an hour.
• If you are changing cleaners, do it now, not two months out. Our handover guide shows how to keep the records continuous.

Two months out: the deep clean and the details

• Book the periodic work the schedule calls for: carpet extraction, hard-floor scrub, vents and light fittings, upholstery, privacy curtains. See floors, curtains and soft furnishings.
• Check the spill kit is complete and in date, and that staff know where it is.
• Check the cleaner's cupboard: labels, safety data sheets, colour coding, nothing on the floor.

One month out: a mock walk-through

• Ask someone who does not work in the practice to walk it like a surveyor: high ledges, under couches, behind the toilet pan, behind reception.
• Ask two staff members at random who cleans the examination couch between patients and what they would do with a blood spill. If the answers differ, train before the visit.
• Pull together three months of cleaning records and the audit results in one folder.

On the day

• Make sure the cleaner has been in the night before, as normal. No special clean that the surveyor will see straight through.
• Keep the folder to hand: policy, schedule, product list, safety data sheets, records, audits.

After the visit

• Close any cleaning actions quickly, and note the change in the schedule so it stays fixed.
• Keep the monthly audit going. It is the cheapest way to make the next visit, three years from now, a non-event.

The part your cleaner should carry

A cleaning contractor for a GP practice should make most of this easy. Ours give each practice a written scope per room, a product list with safety data sheets, an attendance record from sign-ins on our app inside a geofence around the practice with a photo for every visit, and a scored supervisor inspection with photos every three weeks. That is your evidence of monitoring, already collected.

We clean medical practices across Melbourne, from Essendon and Coburg to Mount Waverley and Frankston. See medical cleaning Melbourne, or ask for a walkthrough well before your visit is due.