Unannounced surveys have been used for several years by The Joint Commission in the United States and the Aged Care Standards and Accreditation Agency in Australia, but to our knowledge no peer-reviewed literature has been published on the experiences of changing the procedure from announced to unannounced surveys (2,7,8). Only one project, launched by The Centre for Clinical Governance Research (CCGR) in Australia in 2012, encompasses an empirical test of short-notice surveys in two accreditation programmes. This study was conducted in a paired design where short-notice surveys are compared with the most recent and most advanced notification survey. The study found that use of the short-notice survey approach to the rating of organisational performance was less successful than the advanced notification survey (5% significance level, P=0.044) (9).