[Quality development and quality assurance in allergology]

Since the incidental finding of the anaphylactic reaction allergology has progressed from the empirical medicine emanating from Blackley into a scientifically founded interdisciplinary subject. This development and the resulting improvement of patient care was fundamentally influenced by the research findings and quality efforts of the allergological societies. Quality assurance is solely meant to ensure a certain quality standard. Due to the structural health care reform quality control has been given special emphasis. A deficiency analysis reveals that allergology in the sense of an additional specialisation is limited way too much by the boundaries of the clinical disciplines concerned. Continuing medical education is lacking a standardised subject index. Quality guidelines have been developed under the guidance of the Agency for Quality in Medicine, but have not been passed until the present day. Despite exponentially increasing case numbers allergology further suffers from a lack of quality criteria that would adjust the distribution of remunerations to the actual demand for health care delivery to the general population.