Inflammatory arthritis is a type of arthritis leading to inflammation of joints. Quality standards appear to be efficient tools in advocacy, education, and for quality improvement purposes linked with arthritis. The purpose of this review is to outline the current prospects of quality standards for inflammatory arthritis (including rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile idiopathic arthritis, and spondyloarthritis), and to make a description based on the methodology for standard development.

For achieving this purpose, an audit was made by reviewing three medical databases and major websites of rheumatology and health care quality. An abstract was made based on standards and they were categorized by relating to the structure, processes, or outcomes of health care.10 sets including over 300 standards were abstracted and they were classified into 29 themes. 62% themes were related to processes and 38% themes were related to structure. All the standards enclosed many aspects along with the continuum of patient care from early identification and access to multidisciplinary care, to patient treatment and education, but there were no outcome standards. The methodology used to make standards was highly heterogeneous and patients were involved in only 50% of the development teams.

It is culminated that this study provides a complete report on quality standards in inflammatory arthritis and it also emphasized two uses of the term “Standard” in the quality literature as follows: (i) a numeric target for performance measurement and (ii) a statement about minimum, optimum, or aspirational goals of care that may not be easily measurable. In future patients living with arthritis can be included in standard development and there should be rigorous and transparent methodology which can be used for standard development. It should also consider development of quality measures alongside standards to enhance uptake and impact of both tools.