CFMS | Accreditation

The accreditation of Canadian medical schools is done jointly by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) and the Committee on Accreditation of Canadian Medical Schools (CACMS). To achieve this, the LCME is part of each team that conducts a survey visit of a Canadian Medical school. Only one survey report is produced, which is separately reviewed by the CACMS and LCME Committees. Separate decisions are reached. The CACMS Secretariat and the LCME Secretariat review the separate decisions reached and produces one final decision that is communicated to the school.

Students play an essential role in the accreditation process both within their school and at a national level. For example, the CACMS Committee has student members, students participate as members of the internal review committees for the Institutional Self Study (ISS), conduct their own self-study to provide the student perspective, meet with the survey team at the time of the accreditation visit, one of the student members of CACMS normally serves on the survey team, and one of the student members of CACMS serve as a reviewer on some of the survey reports at the CACMS meeting.

Background

In 2007, the paucity of resources and information that Canadian medical school students can access during accreditation was raised. The CFMS decided to compile a series of documents that would support, guide, and simplify the student portion of accreditation. That series of documents resides within AID: the accreditation information database. Special thanks goes to Dr. Linda Peterson (Chair, MD Student Assessment Steering Committee) and Dr. Nick Busing (Secretary) of CACMS. They kindly overviewed the database to ensure that all our information was accurate.

AID Committee

The committee that created AID was led by Meira Louis (CFMS Western rep) and included the following students:

Muriel Lily (MUN)

Jacob Cookey (Dal)

Charles Lessard Brassard (McGill)

Laura Power (NOSM)

Ju Yoon Yoon (U of M)

Rabiya Jalil (U of S)

Heather Duong (U of S)

Dieter Fritz (U of S)

Sarah Johnson (U of A)

Lindsay Kimmett (U of C)

Jeff Ma (U of C)

Allison Stasiuk (U of M)

The work for AID was carried out between October 2007 and April 2008, and reflects the most current information at that time. Any omissions or errors should be brought to the attention of the CFMS executive for correction.

There are eight separate documents that were prepared.

Intro: You are reading this right now. It simply orients you to AID.
Contacts Document: This document provides a list of all the schools in Canada and the contact information for the students responsible for the most recent round of accreditation. It also provides the dates for the next round of accreditation at each school.
Timeline: This provides some guidelines about when to start different phases of accreditation. It should help to keep you on track.
Tips: This is a handy document that helps you get started with the whole process and orients you to some of the pitfalls other students have encountered along the way.
Ramifications: This explains some of the jargon of accreditation. It also helps you and your student body to understand what the final outcomes might mean.
Survey: This is a template document for the survey that your school will have to create. It is not exhaustive, nor designed to be used verbatim. However, it should give a committee a good starting point with the accreditation standards.
Student Report Template: This is a template document for the student report that needs to be completed after the survey. Again, it is not meant to be a cut-and-paste document, but simply to give schools an idea of how a report could be structured.
Administrative Report Sample: This gives the basic idea of what would be in the final report you school would submit before the site visit. It also helps you to see where your work fits into the bigger picture.

Updates

This database is only useful if it is kept up-to-date. When you have finished your accreditation cycle, we highly encourage you to add your contact information and any changes that might be useful to the database. Any questions can be directed to the current CFMS executive.