Research On American Medical Education Accreditation

Quality is the soul of the medical education, and also the key to its development. It is really a magnificent and urgent subject to keep high quality of medical education while high-scale expansion. Established early and well-developed, American medical education accreditation has some reference value on China. Therefore, it is helpful to learn from the US and build our own accreditation institution of medical education.In this research, an overall picture of American medical education accreditation has been described from the point of view of time and institution. First of all, the author explores the supply-demand background which can tell why it came to being in the early of twentieth century, and gets the conclusion that medical education accreditation of the US is a result of comprehensive effect of several factors such as the development of the times, prosperity of the market economy and expand of medical education and so on. Meanwhile the article makes generalizations of the function and characteristics of the accreditation through the discussion of institutions, criteria and procedures. Furthermore, the stakeholder theory, as well as the theory of stakeholders’co-governance, is applied to analyze the implementation mechanism of medical education accreditation in the US, and come to find out that it is crucial to keep balance between government, universities and society which are three fundamental constituents of implementation mechanism. Finally, this article does a systematical comparison between the US and China, and puts forward some feasible suggestions on how to build medical education accreditation with Chinese characteristics.Totally, American accreditation institution of medical education is a mechanism of external quality assurance which is held by professional organizations, in accordance with pre-set criteria and based on self-assessment by colleges and peer assessment. It ensures graduates of the medical meet the lowest requirements in this field. Thanks to this accreditation institution, American medical education has always been superior to the other countries in the world. For China, on the one hand, with the rapid development of medical education, it is urgent to establish such accreditation institution; but on the other hand, the construction of the accreditation lags behind the development of medical education. So the contradiction of quality and quantity of medical education is increasingly intensifying. How to solve this conflict? It is a good choice to learn from the US and build our own accreditation institution.