Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Can Med Educ J. 2024 Feb 29;15(1):56-61. doi: 10.36834/cmej.75425. eCollection 2024 Feb.
Social accountability (SA), as defined by Boelen and Heck, is the obligation of medical schools to address the needs of communities through education, research and service activities. While SA is embedded within health profession education frameworks in medicine, they are rarely taught within graduate-level (MSc/PhD) education.
As these programs train future medical researchers, we invited first-year graduate students enrolled in a mandatory professionalism class at our institution ( = 111) to complete a survey on their perceptions of the importance of SA in their research, training, and future careers.
Over 80% ( = 87) of respondents agreed that SA is relevant and felt committed to integrating it into their future research activities, only a limited number of students felt confident and/or supported in their abilities to integrate SA into their research.
Specific SA training in graduate education is necessary for students to effectively incorporate elements of SA into their research, and as such support the SA mandates of their training institutions. We posit that awareness of SA principles formalizes the professional standards for biomedical researchers and is thus foundational for developing a professionalism curriculum in graduate education programs in medicine. We propose an expansion of the World Health Organization (WHO) to include partners within the research ecosystem (funding partners, certification bodies) that collaborate with biomedical researchers to make research socially accountable.
Boelen 和 Heck 将社会问责制 (SA) 定义为医学院通过教育、研究和服务活动来满足社区需求的义务。虽然 SA 嵌入在医学中的卫生专业教育框架内，但在研究生（硕士/博士）教育中很少教授。
由于这些课程培养未来的医学研究人员，我们邀请了我们机构必修专业课程的一年级研究生（= 111）完成一项关于他们对 SA 在其研究、培训和未来职业中的重要性的看法的调查。
超过 80%（= 87）的受访者认为 SA 是相关的，并致力于将其融入未来的研究活动中，只有少数学生对自己将 SA 融入研究的能力有信心和/或支持。
研究生教育中需要进行特定的 SA 培训，以便学生能够有效地将 SA 的元素融入他们的研究中，并支持他们所在培训机构的 SA 要求。我们认为，对 SA 原则的认识使生物医学研究人员的专业标准正式化，因此对于在医学研究生教育课程中制定专业课程至关重要。我们提议扩大世界卫生组织 (WHO)，将研究生态系统内的合作伙伴（资助伙伴、认证机构）纳入其中，与生物医学研究人员合作，使研究具有社会责任感。
