Accreditation: A Way to Quality Assurance and Improvement

During recent years there have been many discussions about the meaning of accreditation and the steps for establishing an accreditation system in our country. It is worth to mention that in the third national economic, social and cultural development plan, the process of accreditation of medical education programs and its reinforcement has been mentioned. Simply, accreditation can be defined as granting of approval to an institution, which according to the judgment of experts in the field of study has met the predetermined requirements. In medicine, accreditation of educational programs signifies that national standards for structure, function and efficacy are met by a medical education institution’s program leading to the MD degree (undergraduate medical education) or one of the recognized medical specialties (postgraduate training). Similar to the other parts of the world in the second half of the twentieth century, the situation of medical education in our country faced a rapid and imbalanced growth in medical education (especially for general medicine) during the last twenty years. Therefore recognition and applying the methods, useful in quality improvement of medical education, is of utmost importance. In this regard, establishment of accreditation system will be very effective, and in the third national development plan a lot of attention has been paid to the issue of establishing and upgrading the evaluation and accreditation systems of educational institutions and programs. In this article, we will overview the basics of accreditation, steps to establish an accreditation system, the process of review and accreditation of programs and a brief description of well-known accreditation systems in different parts of the world.