ABSTRACT
The Health and Social Care Act made it clear that the Healthcare Commission had responsibility to consider the extent to which healthcare organisations protect and improve the health of the public and to assess the quality of the delivery of relevant public health systems. The importance of public health is captured in the Assessment for Improvement: the annual health check, the document produced by the Healthcare Commission in March 2005 that describes the framework for assessing each healthcare organisation in England through an annual review and rating. The Healthcare Commission established a range of public health programmes of work during its first year of operations. The chapter outlines these public health programmes within the Healthcare Commission. The development of the criteria for core and developmental standards involved input from a range of stakeholders and public health practitioners, and they were consulted on widely.
