The essential enterprise: the critical role of accreditation in the 21st century
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INTRODUCTION
Open Access
The essential enterprise: the critical role of accreditation in the 21st century Jason R. Frank1,2*, Sarah Taber1, Marta van Zanten3, Fedde Scheele4,5,6, Danielle Blouin7 and on behalf of the International Health Professions Accreditation Outcomes Consortium Health professions education (HPE) is undergoing rapid change to a competency-based world, and accreditation change is part of that story [1–4]. Despite over 100 years of scientific, instructional, and biomedical innovation, health professions education continues to face criticism. Deficits and variations in graduate competence, patient harm, and preparedness for modern health care are considered major challenges for current designs for HPE [5, 6]. Can accreditation help to address these issues? Accreditation is commonly viewed as an essential component of an effective health professions education (HPE) system, valued both as a lever for quality assurance as well as for continuous quality improvement. However, for such an essential enterprise, the body of literature on HPE accreditation is small. Accreditation systems exist worldwide in a wide variety of forms. Do we all agree on what we mean by “accreditation”? What are the essential components of an accreditation system? What works best for a given context? What are the emerging issues in contemporary education? What are best and “next” practices? We have only the work of a few pioneering scholars to inform these questions, and no global consensus on which to advance our thinking. Enter an accreditation community of practice, the International Health Professions Accreditation Outcomes Consortium (IHPAOC). We founded this organization in 2012 to advance the practice of HPE accreditation. To date, this group has organized two world summits on HPE accreditation, one in 2013 in conjunction with the International Conference on Residency Education * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Office of Specialty Education, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, Ottawa, Canada 2 Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
(ICRE) in Calgary, Canada, and the second in 2018 in conjunction with the Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) conference in Basel, Switzerland. Both summits used an iterative group process to identify themes related to the current state of and future directions for HPE accreditation. At its first world summit in 2013, IHPAOC members from around the world, including Canada, the United States, Australia, Europe and China, began a collaborative process of discussion and consensus-building to identify priority topics and build a research agenda. Working groups were formed to further elaborate on the identified topics and each group produced a paper. BMC Medical Education was chosen as vehicle to widely disseminate the IHPOAC findings in an open access format. This is the resulting accreditation paper series. Each paper makes a primary contribution to the
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