Abstract
The quality hospital services is an important theme for society and central object of many discussions, including among the main discussions of managers and users of the health system. Although the quality issue has been discussed academically for decades, it has become more evident and robust since the emergence of hospital accreditation processes, the main tool used by managers to structure, validate and legitimize the processes dedicated to quality management in the hospital environment. Owing to recency of the theme, complexity level and social interest about the subject, this article aims to understand it by bibliometric study followed by a systematic literature review. Forty-five articles were selected from the following databases: Ebsco, Periódicos Capes, Scopus, Spell and Web of Science. The results showed that hospital accreditation contributes to profound changes regarding quality and safety in care, but there are incipiencies and gaps in some topics. Such as: patients' perspective regarding quality and satisfaction; financial results from accreditation; reasons that lead to the disqualification of institutions; comparative studies of the differences between the requirements of the different accrediting entities; and, studies focused on hospital consumer behavior.