While accreditation has been widely used in many countries to improve quality and safety of care, this process is a relatively new concept for healthcare professionals in the French-speaking community of Belgium. And as all new concepts do, it raises many questions about methods, costs and potential benefits. It is worth noticing that these questions vary depending on the group of professionals taken into account.Under the supervision of the Belgian French-Speaking Community’s Ministry of Health, santhea, the largest French speaking association of hospitals, and the School of Public Health of the Université Libre de Bruxelles have been asked to develop a guide for academic hospitals as well as general hospitals describing how hospitals can prepare themselves in order to start an accreditation process. The study began in November 2012 and ended in October 2013. After a short description of the accreditation concept as well as the (many) particularities of the Belgium’s institutional context, three accreditation manuals are compared, in terms of content and philosophy, which leads to the conclusion that while most themes are common, the philosophy can be quite different. Next we test to what extend accreditation norms are in line with everyday work of professionals. We find out that most norms are considered by hospital professionals as being important, which means that the accreditation process could be accepted among them. By evaluating the implementation of a set of accreditation norms in four hospitals, we observed that some of these norms are already quite good implemented, but others are not. The study also proposes a tool which gives hospitals the possibility to evaluate if they are ready to start an accreditation process. It has been developed on the basis of literature references and accreditation manuals customized for French speaking hospitals. The tool is composed of 46 criteria grouped in 16 domains. Once used in a few hospitals, benchmarking will be proposed.Both qualitative and quantitative methods ...