The impact of accreditation on medical schools’ processes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Increased emphasis is being placed worldwide on accreditation of undergraduate medical education programmes, and costs of participation in accreditation continue to rise. The primary purposes of accreditation are to ensure the quality of medical education and to promote quality improvement. Student performance data as indicators of the impact of accreditation have important limitations. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of accreditation using an innovative marker: the processes implemented at medical schools as a result of accreditation. This conceptual model suggests that accreditation drives medical schools to implement and strengthen processes that support quality in medical education. METHODS: In this qualitative study, conducted in 2015-2016, interviews and focus group discussions with deans, undergraduate medical education deans and faculty leaders at 13 of the 17 Canadian medical schools were used to elicit perspectives about processes influenced by accreditation; the method of constant comparative analysis associated with grounded theory was used to generate themes of processes. Perceived negative consequences of accreditation on medical education programmes were also explored. RESULTS: Nine themes representing processes reported as resulting from accreditation were identified. These processes related to: (i) governance, (ii) data collection and analysis, (iii) monitoring, (iv) documentation, (v) creation and revision of policies and procedures, (vi) continuous quality improvement, (vii) faculty members' engagement, (viii) academic accountability and (ix) curriculum reforms. Themes representing negative consequences of accreditation included (i) costs, (ii) staff and faculty members' morale and feelings, (iii) school reputation and (iv) standards. The identified processes, given their nature, appear likely to be associated with improvement of quality in medical education. These results help justify the costs associated with accreditation. CONCLUSIONS: This study uses an innovative marker, medical schools' processes, to evaluate the impact of accreditation. Results provide evidence that accreditation-related activities steer medical education programmes towards establishment of processes likely to be associated with improved quality in medical education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.138 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".