These Criteria are applicable to all of the organizational types, to all sizes of organizations, to all nature of persons who are contributing to the leadership of continuing medical education. All continuing medical education that you plan is intended to be inserted into efforts to improve practice. And if you look around you in your organization, in the system in which you operate, you will find places in health care institutions, in your community, where efforts are being made to improve practice and where you can bring continuing medical education and say: We want to help. We can add and contribute to this.
Non-educational strategies are of benefit to your physician learners and they’re not dependent on the presence of any kind of organizational type.
It’s important for any educators to identify the factors outside their own control that are affecting what the physicians do and the outcomes of the physicians’ practice. And no matter who you are or where you are, you can look around and look at the life of your physicians and the world in which they operate to determine: What are some of those barriers? Then you can turn around and say: I’m going to try to overcome some of those barriers. Maybe I’m going to need to collaborate and cooperate with other organizations that are accredited or non-accredited in order to overcome those barriers or to improve my ability to meet my mission.
And certainly it won’t be difficult for you to find quality improvement activities that are going on and quality improvement measures that are going on that you can contribute to, you as an educator, to improve the quality of the education that’s going on.
And we all expect that you’re responsible for your education. So, an organization has control of their whole educational enterprise to improve practice, to use non-educational strategies, to identify the factors and bring those factors inside their educational activity as attempts to overcome the barriers. And that the control that you have of your educational activity includes working with collaborators and partners, but it doesn’t mean that you give up the control of the content of your continuing medical education. All focused, like in Criterion 21, on improving quality. And that’s the organization that ACCME is looking for to give Accreditation with Commendation to.
