Benbassat Jochanan, Baumal Reuben, Cohen Robert
Department of Medicine (retired), Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Centre, Jerusalem, Israel.
Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology (retired), University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Rambam Maimonides Med J. 2022 Jul 31;13(3):e0023. doi: 10.5041/RMMJ.10480.
External accreditation reviews of undergraduate medical curricula play an important role in their quality assurance. However, these reviews occur only at 4-10-year intervals and are not optimal for the immediate identification of problems related to teaching. Therefore, the Standards of Medical Education in Israel require medical schools to engage in continuous, ongoing monitoring of their teaching programs for compliance with accreditation standards. In this paper, we propose the following: (1) this monitoring be assigned to independent medical education units (MEUs), rather than to an infrastructure of the dean's office, and such MEUs to be part of the school governance and draw their authority from university institutions; and (2) the differences in the importance of the accreditation standards be addressed by discerning between the "most important" standards that have been shown to improve student well-being and/or patient health outcomes; "important" standards associated with student learning and/or performance; "possibly important" standards with face validity or conflicting evidence for validity; and "least important" standards that may lead to undesirable consequences. According to this proposal, MEUs will evolve into entities dedicated to ongoing monitoring of the education program for compliance with accreditation standards, with an authority to implement interventions. Hopefully, this will provide MEUs and faculty with the common purpose of meeting accreditation requirements, and an agreed-upon prioritization of accreditation standards will improve their communication and recommendations to faculty.
本科医学课程的外部认证审查在其质量保证方面发挥着重要作用。然而，这些审查仅每4至10年进行一次，对于即时发现与教学相关的问题并非最佳方式。因此，以色列的医学教育标准要求医学院校持续不断地监测其教学计划是否符合认证标准。在本文中，我们提出以下建议：（1）将这种监测工作分配给独立的医学教育单位（MEU），而非院长办公室的一个部门，并且这些医学教育单位应成为学校管理的一部分，并从大学机构获取其权力；（2）通过区分已证明能改善学生福祉和/或患者健康结果的“最重要”标准、与学生学习和/或表现相关的“重要”标准、具有表面效度或有效性证据相互矛盾的“可能重要”标准以及可能导致不良后果的“最不重要”标准，来处理认证标准重要性的差异。根据这一建议，医学教育单位将演变成致力于持续监测教育计划是否符合认证标准并有权实施干预措施的实体。希望这将为医学教育单位和教师提供满足认证要求的共同目标，并且对认证标准达成一致的优先排序将改善他们之间的沟通以及向教师提出的建议。
