Within health professional education around the world, there exists a growing awareness of the professional duty to be socially responsible, being attentive to the needs of all members of communities, regions, and nations, especially those who disproportionately suffer from the adverse influence of social determinants. However, much work still remains to progress beyond such good intentions. Moving from contemplation to action means embracing social accountability as a key guiding principle for change. Social accountability means that health institutions attend to improving the performance of individual practitioners and health systems by directing educational and practice interventions to promote the health of all the public and assessing the systemic effects of these interventions. In this Reflection, the authors (1) review the reasons why health professional schools and their governing bodies should codify, in both curricular and accreditation standards, norms of excellence in social accountability, (2) present four considerations crucial to successfully implementing this codification, and (3) discuss the challenges such changes might entail. The authors conclude by noting that in adopting socially accountable criteria, schools will need to expand their philosophical scope to recognize social accountability as a vitally important part of their institutional professional identity.
Last. Arno K. Kumagai(U of T: University of Toronto)H-Index: 31
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Medical schools are increasingly called to include social responsibility in their mandates. As such, they are focusing their attention on the social determinants of health (SDOH) as key drivers in the health of the patients and communities they serve. However, underlying this emphasis on the SDOH is
Introduction Scholars and practitioners in medicine and public health have devoted significant time and effort to defining the social determinants of health and identifying resulting inequities in health outcomes. By focusing predominately on social determinants as referent sources of morbidity and mortality, however, health care professionals can be led to believe that the origins of poor health-related outcomes are disconnected from the ways in which social, economic, political, and environmen...
Many health professions education programs in high-income countries (HICs) have adopted a competency-based approach to learning. Although global health programs have followed this trend, defining and assessing competencies has proven problematic, particularly in resource-constrained settings of low-
Social accountability in the health sector has been promoted as a strategy to improve the quality and performance of health providers in low- and middle-income countries. Whether improvements occur, however, depends on the willingness and ability of health providers to respond to societal pressure for better care. This article uses a realist approach to review cases of collective citizen action and advocacy with the aim to identify key mechanisms of provider responsiveness. Purposeful searches f...
In this essay, I borrow the idea of universal precautions from infection control and suggest that family physicians use a set of considerations, based on the mnemonic UNIVERSAL, to nurture cultural humility, enter a metaphoric “space-in-between” in cross-cultural encounters, and foster global fluency. These UNIVERSAL considerations I base on my experiences in global family medicine, attending to economically poor and socially marginalized patients in both international and domestic settings. The...
Last. Trevor Gibbs(Dund.: University of Dundee)H-Index: 11
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AbstractHealth systems worldwide are confronted with challenges due to increased demand from their citizens, an aging population, a variety of health risks and limited resources. Key health stakeholders, including academic institutions and medical schools, are urged to develop a common vision for a more efficient and equitable health sector. It is in this environment that Boelen and Heck defined the concept of the “Social Accountability of Medical Schools” – a concept that encourages schools to ...
#1Robert Woollard(The College of Family Physicians Canada)H-Index: 15
#2Sandy Buchman(The College of Family Physicians Canada)H-Index: 10
Last. Ritika Goel(The College of Family Physicians Canada)H-Index: 6
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> What good does it do to treat people’s illness and then send them back to the conditions that made them sick?[1][1] This is the third article in a series about the social accountability of family medicine. Previous commentaries have described the scope of social accountability[2][2] and the
As physicians work to achieve optimal health outcomes for their patients, they often struggle to address the issues that arise outside the clinic. Social, economic, and political factors influence patients’ burden of disease, access to treatment, and health outcomes. This challenge has motivated rec
#1Ritika Goel(The College of Family Physicians Canada)H-Index: 6
#2Sandy Buchman(The College of Family Physicians Canada)H-Index: 10
Last. Robert Woollard(The College of Family Physicians Canada)H-Index: 15
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As family physicians, we hold a unique position within the health care system. We have the opportunity to build trusting lifelong relationships with our patients and are frequently their first connection to needed health and social services. We see patients in the full context of their lives,
This paper establishes a Stackelberg competition model of two universities considering social responsibility (SR) and market sensitivity (MS) and examines the equilibrium results of four different scenarios: only the leader implements SR; only the follower implements SR; both the leader and the follower implement SR; neither the leader nor the follower implements SR. Then, a comparative analysis is carried out on the influence of MS and SR level. The results show that the influence of MS depends...
PURPOSE Medical schools face growing pressures to produce stronger evidence of their social accountability, but measuring social accountability remains a global challenge. This narrative review aimed to identify and document common themes and indicators across large-scale social accountability frameworks to facilitate development of initial operational constructs to evaluate social accountability in medical education. METHOD The authors searched 5 electronic databases and platforms and the World...
Last. Lorena Casal-Otero(University of Santiago de Compostela)H-Index: 1
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Objective:The purpose of this study was to describe how a service-learning methodology can promote blood donation among students by increasing levels of knowledge and improving attitudes while deve...
PURPOSE: To explore how the construct of critical consciousness has been conceptualized within the medical education literature and identify the main elements of critical consciousness in medical education so as to inform educational strategies to foster socially conscious physicians. METHOD: In March 2019, the authors conducted a literature search of four databases and Google Scholar, seeking articles discussing critical consciousness in medical education published any time after 1970. Three of...
BACKGROUND: The Council on Chiropractic Education Australasia (CCE-A) is tasked with assessment and accreditation of chiropractic programs (CPs) in the Australasian community. To achieve this process the CCE-A has developed educational standards and graduate competencies which include minimum expectations of graduates prior to entry into the workforce. We sought to explore if these are changing overtime, and if so are these changes for the better. METHOD: The CCE-A 2009 and 2017 Competency Stand...
CONTEXT: Internationalisation in medical education raises ethical concerns over, for instance, its for-profit orientation, the potential erosion of cultural diversity and the possibility that standardised education may not meet the needs of patients everywhere. These concerns fit into a broader debate on social responsibility in higher education. This study aims to explore how academic staff in international medical education experience and act upon the ethical concerns that pertain to their pro...
BACKGROUND: Tobacco smoking remains a public health problem among adolescents in the United States. While Web-based interventions for smoking prevention have been successful at the individual level, there is still an urgent need to understand their engagement capabilities and their effects at the social level. In the current study, we aimed to (1) learn about adolescents' subjective experience with a Web-based program called a smoking prevention interactive experience (ASPIRE), (2) obtain sugges...
Last. William Ventres(University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences)H-Index: 13
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ABSTRACTThe Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, seeks to transform its health professions curricula in order to achieve equity in health outcomes. Integral to this are interp...
#2Jodie Ornstein(U of C: University of Calgary)H-Index: 2
Last. Douglas L Myhre(U of C: University of Calgary)H-Index: 9
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AbstractBackground/Objective: The rural physician shortage remains an international crisis. Rural rotations are commonly used to address the issue. This review assesses the published evidence of th...
