Compliance Check: Non-Clinical Education and Standard 3

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Compliance Check is a series of quick tips to help you meet accreditation requirements.

Understanding the Exceptions to Standard 3 can help ease your administrative burden. 

Tip: With non-clinical education, you do not need to identify, mitigate, or disclose financial relationships.

Leadership, communication, and mindfulness training are good examples of non-clinical education. They are non-clinical because there is no opportunity for people in control of content to insert commercial bias toward the products and business lines—for example, medications, medical devices, or pharmaceuticals—of an ineligible company.

Have questions about what constitutes an eligible or an ineligible company? Our list of sample eligible and ineligible companies can help clear up any confusion.

Just remember: the Standards were designed to regulate relationships with ineligible companies. When there’s no possibility for someone to insert commercial bias toward the products of an ineligible company, you can skip Standard 3. That means, you do not have to collect disclosures from the planners, reviewers, speakers, faculty, and facilitators controlling the content of your non-clinical education activities. Similarly, there is nothing you need to disclose to learners, either.