The facility audit and review method: evaluating institutional ethics in health care organizations

Auditing processes--such as financial, compliance, and investigative audits-are commonplace in the health care industry. However, an audit to assess institutional ethics in health care facilities is a fairly new concept. The Facility Audit and Review Method is an assessment tool that provides an evaluation scheme to review the organization's policies, procedures, and outcomes using an ethical perspective. This article discusses ethics in the context of health care, the various types of auditing mechanisms used in health care facilities, and how these two--ethics and audits--come together to form the 4-stage Facility Audit and Review Method.