Responsiveness to societal needs in postgraduate medical education: the role of accreditation
- PDF / 458,912 Bytes
- 7 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 10 Downloads / 158 Views
REVIEW
Open Access
Responsiveness to societal needs in postgraduate medical education: the role of accreditation Ingrid Philibert1* and Danielle Blouin2
Abstract Background: Social accountability in medical education has been defined as an obligation to direct education, research, and service activities toward the most important health concerns of communities, regions, and nations. Drawing from the results of a summit of international experts on postgraduate medical education and accreditation, we highlight the importance of local contexts in meeting societal aims and present different approaches to ensuring societal input into medical education systems around the globe. Main text: We describe four priorities for social responsiveness that postgraduate medical education needs to address in local and regional contexts: (1) optimizing the size, specialty mix, and geographic distribution of the physician workforce; (2) ensuring graduates’ competence in meeting societal goals for health care, population health, and sustainability; (3) promoting a diverse physician workforce and equitable access to graduate medical education; and (4) ensuring a safe and supportive learning environment that promotes the professional development of physicians along with safe and effective patient care in settings where trainees participate in care. We relate these priorities to the values proposed by the World Health Organization for social accountability: relevance, quality, cost-effectiveness, and equity; discuss accreditation as a lever for change; and describe existing and evolving efforts to make postgraduate medical education socially responsive. Conclusion: Achieving social responsiveness in a competency-based postgraduate medical education system requires accrediting organizations to ensure that learning emphasizes relevant competencies in postgraduate curricula and educational experiences, and that graduates possess desired attributes. At the same time, institutions sponsoring graduate medical education need to provide safe and effective patient care, along with a supportive learning and working environment. Keywords: Accreditation, Diversity, Equity, Postgraduate medical education, Societal accountability
Background The medical education enterprise is accountable to the citizens who will be served by the physician workforce it produces [1]. An appropriately sized, skilled, and distributed physician workforce is critical to the health of any nation. The composition and skill set of this workforce * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Medical Education, Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University, North Haven, CT, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
is determined in significant part during the postgraduate phase of medical education. Three decades ago, the World Federation for Medical Education (WFME) declared that the aim of medical education is to produce physicians who will promote the health of all people, and noted that this aim was not
Data Loading...
