Experience with accreditation of health professional's education in the south-east Asia region: expert workshop

Overview

As part of region-wide efforts to advance Universal Health Coverage, Member States in the South-East Asia Region have committed to a Decade of Strengthening HRH, 2015 – 2024, with a focus on transformative education and rural retention. Accreditation of health professional training institutions is one of eleven WHO recommendations on ways to transform and scale up health professionals education and training in its 2013 education guidelines.  This recommendation was rated strong despite the quality of evidence being rated low, because high value was placed on “an uncertain but potentially important impact on both quality and relevance of the health workforce”.  It is one of the milestones in the new WHO Global Health Workforce Strategy 2030: “by 2020 all countries have established accreditation mechanism for health training institutions”. 

16 participants with a wide variety of expertise in accreditation of health professionals education (academicians, representatives of nursing and medical councils, heads of independent accreditation bodies and officials from ministry of health and ministry of education) from five SEAR countries (India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh) participated in this workshop. Before attending the workshop experts completed a survey on accreditation for their respective countries.