The first semina on accreditation of medical education since the establishment of Working Committee for the Accreditation of Medical Education (WCAME) in March 2008 was held in Beijing, on May 15-16, 2009, jointly sponsored by the Professional Board for Medical Education of Chinese Association of Higher Education, the Australian Medical Council (AMC), and the WCAME. More than 110 WCAME members and administrators from 51 medical schools attended the semina, with Boji Cheng, the Secretary-General of the Secretariat of WCAME and Weimin Wang, the Deputy Secretary-General chairing the seminar.
Yanfei Liu, Director of the WCAME delivered a keynote speech on the publicity and mobilization of the accreditation of medical education to realize the ultimate goal of promoting the quality of medical education in China. Qiming Wang, Director of Agricultural and Medical Education Division, Higher Education Department of Ministry of Education, presented the status quo of the health professionals in China, addressing the trend of internationalization and reformation for medical education as well as the many problems exsiting in medical education nowadays. Prof. Laurence Geffen, former Chair of the Accreditation Committee of the AMC introduced the application of international standards of medical education made by the World Federation for Medical Education (WFME), the efforts of the Association for Medical Education in the Western Pacific Region (AMEWPR) in promoting the accreditation of medical education as well as the cooperation between the AMC and the WCAME in carrying out pilot accreditation of medical education in China.
In addition, Prof. Laurence Geffen and Prof. Michael Field, current Chair of the Accreditation Committee of the AMC and Prof. Theanne Walters, the deputy executive director of the AMC also shared their experience of accreditation, such as how to prepare or what should the assessors pay attention to during the site visit. The heated discussion in the seminar implied the promising future of the accreditation of medical education.
