In the year 1996, accreditation process started in France by the mean of a special law, which creates for any health structure an obligation to be assessed within 5 years and a specific organism to set up the assessment process and train a network of assessors which have to be professionals still in exercise (medical, nursing and administrative staff). Since the process has to be started from scratch it was decided to set up a unique accreditation manual, which has to be applied to any setting and speciality. In this context psychiatric resources fear to be penalised because of their specificities specially their extramural activities. This paper is using the first 120 accreditation processes completed by ANAES (the French accreditation organisation) in order to compare psychiatric and no psychiatric resource results to accreditation. The process was based on assessment on how the diverse quality criteria described in the manual were completed; they were 10 main chapters concerning patients rights and information, patients charts, care organisation, management, logistic, risk management and quality control. Each of the chapter has been divided into up to 10 criteria, which set up rules for quality and propose references which have to be first self assessed by the team; the assessors will then start from this self assessment to make their own and propose a note. The notes are compiled to decide if the reference has been fully completed, partially completed or not completed at all resulting in recommendations or reserve. At the end of the process all chapter results allow to pronounce the accreditation status of the structure: no reserve no recommendation, recommendation, reserve, major reserve. This last result means no accreditation and is attributed when a major risk has been assessed; in this case the structure will be given a short delay to modify the problem and is reassessed. This paper is based on analyses of 65 no psychiatric and 41 psychiatric hospitals private or public; the 14 hospitals, which include psychiatric units, were excluded since it was impossible to attribute results to a specific unit. In comparing the global accreditation results, the psychiatric one have better results: no one got a major reserve and 22% vs. 46.6% for the no psychiatric got reserve, on the other hand the psychiatric got more recommendation 58.5% vs. 35.4% but more no reserve no recommendation 19.5% vs. 13.8%. The comparison of the average number of either reserve or recommendation is also in the favour of the psychiatric ones. In order to look at the diverse domain we compare percentages of no psychiatric and psychiatric having at least a reserve or recommendation in one of the diverse domain covered by the manual: no psychiatric have better results in all domain especially patients charts, care organisation which were significantly worse in the no psychiatric. However, when the profiles are compared (relative percentage of either reserve or recommendation) psychiatric got lower results for patient’s rights and information and better results concerning patients charts and care organisation. Since this quantitative comparison was back up by a qualitative evaluation based on interview on diverse professionals, which participated to the accreditation process, some specific theme emerged which could be check by looking in detail to the corresponding criteria. The first theme is dealing with infectious risks: sanitarians risk controls and prevention mechanisms assessments were more frequently deficient in the psychiatric hospitals than in the control group, however they were not difference for setting up these controls and mechanisms. The second theme concerns patient’s rights and information: when results are looked at globally no difference appears however this theme appears higher if the psychiatric accreditation profiles; when looking at the specific reference concerning the intimacy and dignity patient’s respect psychiatric results seem lower: 9.4% of the psychiatric hospitals reserve or recommendation are concerned by this reference vs. 2.5% in the no psychiatric. Some limitation of these comparisons should be mentioned; size effects was controlled for and no difference was found but all results presented here concern the first accreditation procedures where the most concerned and performing structures were candidates. We assume that this obvious bias affects both type of structure at a similar degree, which may be wrong. To conclude the accreditation process could be applied to psychiatric as well as no psychiatric structures and it appears that psychiatric resources obtain globally better results than no psychiatric; however two conflicting areas appear for the psychiatric resources: risk control procedures and intimacy and freedom patients rights completion. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]