Practice Standards Scheme

Discover how the RCVS Practice Standards Scheme accredits veterinary practices across the UK, setting benchmarks for excellence in animal care while supporting continuous improvement and professional best practice.

Our Practice Standards Scheme (PSS) is a voluntary accreditation for UK veterinary practices

Being accredited by the PSS demonstrates a practice’s commitment to the highest standards of animal care. By setting and monitoring these standards, we aim to give pet and livestock owners peace of mind when choosing their vet.

Veterinary practices are assessed every four years. Each four-year cycle gives your practice the opportunity to improve and showcase your improvements. The accreditation process gives your team a useful framework for running their practice to the highest standards and provides a full clinical and regulatory compliance audit.

How the PSS could benefit your practice

Would you recommend the PSS?

I would definitely recommend the practice standard scheme to other practices. Yes, I would recommend it to the papers. We definitely recommend the practice standard scheme to other practices. I would highly recommend MPSS to other practices considering joining the scheme.

I think it gives you a good focus on improving your clients’ customer pet care, and also your staff care. I think it’s the one way of having a framework that covers pretty much everything that you need to do to run a practice. It makes everything, from health and safety through employment law, applying care to patient care, to drug management, pharmacy management, through all the practice protocols.

Everything’s in one place and it gives you really good guidelines about what you should be looking at and what you could be improving. It’s all what we should be doing anyway, but it does give you a bit of a kick to actually do it.

How difficult is the PSS?

If you’re starting from scratch with the scheme, I think there’s a lot of work to get up to speed, and that will obviously vary from practice to practice. Initially it seems quite daunting because it appears to be a lot of work to do, but actually it’s all absolutely necessary and very realistic.

Once you’re up to speed with it, I think it saves a lot of time and effort from a day-to-day basis, and it’s all very much achievable.

Is the PSS worth it?

It has been worth all the hard work, yeah. We’re really proud of what we’ve done. It’s great to have a brand that we can market to clients and to potential staff, to show that we’ve achieved something we are all very proud of.

It does nothing but improve the level of care you give. I can’t see a potential negative at all. If it means that someone comes in and says to you, “These are the things that you could be doing better,” these are only just positive to the practice.

I think anything that improves your standards of care and improves your staff compliance can only be a good thing. There’s no reason not to join.

Recognising accredited practices

PSS-accredited vet practices can display the RCVS accredited practice logo. This helps animal owners easily identify which practices in their local area meet our high standards.Since 2011, we have used this blue logo. Some practices may still display our old logo.

Accreditation that fits your practice

We recognise that different practices have different specialisms, so we have developed a range of accreditation levels. These vary by type of premises, services offered and species treated.

Each PSS accreditation has a set of core standards that align with the legal requirements for all UK veterinary practices.

The PSS accreditations we administer are

General practice – small animal, equine or farm animal
Vet nurse training practice
Equine general practice (ambulatory)
Small animal emergency service clinic
Equine emergency service clinic
Veterinary hospital – small animal or equine

These documents provide more details of the modules and accreditation requirements:

Applying to the Practice Standards Scheme

Applying to the PSS

You can apply to the Practice Standards Scheme through our online system, Stanley.On this page you can find step-by-step instructions on how to submit your application.

The PSS assessment process

Practice Standards Scheme (PSS) assessment is an ongoing process that begins once you’ve submitted your application.Find out what to expect at each stage, including what assessment day is like.

PSS accreditation levels

There are different levels of accreditation your practice premises can apply for, depending on the type of premises, services offered and species treated.