Abstract
Socially Accountable Medical Education is a global educational movement transforming the development and delivery of medical schools in higher education. It is described as an upstream policy approach that seeks to align medical education and local community healthcare needs. To better understand social accountability as a policy initiative, we conducted a narrative review to identify key themes in the literature around frameworks of implementation. Our findings illustrate that social accountability has been mostly defined to date in terms of outcomes and related-actions and that there is a lack of focus on critical social constructs, such as power and place, that can reorient processes and inequities within health systems and educational institutions. We conclude that while socially accountable medical education is a promising paradigm shift in higher education, we call for a more complexified, contextualized, and nuanced approach.
Highlights
Better alignment between medical education and the health care needs of society is considered a key pathway for improving human health (Boelen & Heck, 1995; World Health Organisation (WHO), 1978)
The World Health Organisation (WHO), which gets most frequently cited in the literature, has defined Socially Accountable Medical Education (SAME) as medical schools having ―the obligation to direct their education, research and service activities towards addressing the priority health concerns of the community, region, and/or nation they have a mandate to serve‖ (Boelen & Heck, 1995)
This definition, and the meaning it ascribes to SAME, has been adopted by most medical schools who declare a social accountability mandate
Summary
Better alignment between medical education and the health care needs of society is considered a key pathway for improving human health (Boelen & Heck, 1995; WHO, 1978). This alignment, termed Socially Accountable Medical Education (SAME), has become a priority in medical school reform and accreditation standards (Boelen & Wollard, 2009, 2010). Medical schools who adopt a social accountability mandate aim to educate future and current physicians to deliver evidence-based and culturally-relevant healthcare to local communities in an equitable and cost-effective manner (Boelen & Heck, 1995; Boelen et al, 2016). Efforts to reconcile the goals of standardization and social accountability is urgently needed to be able to advance our understanding of SAME and its educational impact on students, faculty, and communities
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