Accreditation issues being resolved -- Dal med school

Dalhousie’s medical school says it’s on track to win back approval from international standards body.

Dal's medical school building. (Photo: Laura Hochman)

Dalhousie’s undergraduate medical school says it’s making progress on changing its practices to comply with international education standards.

The university was put on a two-year probation on Oct. 15 by the body that sets international medical education standards, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education.

The committee, sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Medical Association, is the accreditation authority for medical education programs in the U.S. and Canada. 

The committee reviews medical schools about every seven years, says Thomas Marrie, Dalhousie’s dean of the faculty of medicine.  It reviewed Dalhousie this past summer and found the school to be non-compliant with 17 out of 132 standards. The standards found to be non-compliant are “largely administrative and curriculum-based,” says Marrie.

The committee gave Dalhousie two years to conform to its standards and the school says it is well on its way. It has begun an extensive review of the curriculum with 20 groups, and more than 200 faculty and students are participating in an overhaul of the program.

An easily remedied non-compliant standard was a health authority standard – “there weren’t enough lockers,” says Marrie. “This has already been taken care of.”

Over the summer, Marrie put together an appeal to the committee’s ruling. The medical authority subsequently won a decision that seven of 17 items on the list were, in fact, compliant. Dal said it had been unable to provide the committee with all the facts at the time of its application. Marrie says he “doesn’t know why the facts weren’t available at the time of the review.”

One of the non-compliant standards was Dal’s curriculum. At a Dal Senate meeting last week, President Tom Traves said that, in reviewing the curriculum, the faculty had let some issues slide such as updating the curriculums.

Marrie acknowledges that “the curriculum hadn’t been reviewed for quite some time.”

Students are fully behind the changes and have full confidence in the school’s ability to meet and beat the committee’s standards before the probation period expires.

“The faculty and staff at Dalhousie Medicine have done an incredible job in maintaining transparency with the students and have continued to request and make use of our feedback and perspective on the issues we need to address,” says Aris Lavranos, president of the Dalhousie Medical Student Society. “From small committees looking at specific objectives, to larger plenary sessions students contribute and even lead discussion.”

In a letter to prospective students on Dal’s website, the dean and assistant dean of the school inform students that “the areas of noncompliance are largely administrative in nature and relate to requirements for better curriculum management, monitoring and evaluation.” They assure current and incoming students that their program will continue to be fully accredited during the probationary period and that it will not affect students’ ability to graduate and find a residency.

Marrie writes in the letter that he expects the new curriculum, called the Tupper Trail, will be put into action by September 2010. He says it will be “a leading-edge curriculum” and that it will be” the best undergraduate curriculum in North America.”

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