Montego Bay, St James – The region’s accreditation body for medical education – the Caribbean Accreditation Authority for Education in Medicine, and other Health Professions (CAAM-HP) – received a passing grade from international accreditation agencies at last week’s invitational conference on accreditation of medical education programmes in the Caribbean.

CAAM was established by CARICOM in 2003 to fill the void created by European Union (EU) regulations, which forced Britain’s General Medical Council (GMC) to discontinue accreditation of the University of the West Indies (UWI) medical programmes.

Speaking with the Sunday Observer last Tuesday, the final day of the three-day conference held at the Ritz Carlton Rose Hall in Montego Bay, Dr James Hallock, president of the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Students (ECFMG), praised CAAM for making strides as a regional body.

“In the long term we would like to see accreditation throughout the world become more standardised,” he contended. “The way to do it is by developing more regional efforts and this one, even though two years and 10 months and three days old, has really moved quite nicely and we would like to see the momentum that they’ve been able to generate continue. I think that is critically important.”

Hallock, whose US-based organisation accredits individual medical students, said there was heightening concern over the large number of medical schools that were springing up throughout the Caribbean and other places in the world and that an agency, such as CAAM would ensure a standardised quality.

“As we look at evaluating individual students we look at the schools they have come from, so we welcome an accreditation process in the Caribbean that will begin to standardise the schools and the curricula,” he said.

Additionally Dr Hans Karle, president of the World Federation for Medical Accreditation (wfma), co-sponsors of the event, said the conference would build a greater awareness of the use of accreditation as a tool to promote improved quality of medical education.

“When we discussed this a year ago we found that having a conference like this could create a lot of awareness of the need for quality improvement and using accreditation system as a tool for that kind of thing,” he said.

At present, 10 CARICOM countries have signed on to CAAM, which became operational in July 2004. They include Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Bahamas, St Kitts and Nevis and Guyana.

Professor Errol Walrond, chairman of CAAM, said that the group has, since its inception, examined and accredited the UWI and is now in the process of doing similar examinations at the University of Guyana and the St Georges University School of Medicine with a view to their accreditation.

The University of Guyana, which was established in 1963 had not undergone any accreditation prior to CAAM, while St George’s has been evaluated by a number of United States accreditation agencies.

“We are going in the right direction,” he said. “We have worked with the UWI and are now surveying two other schools in the region. In the future we will include other schools in the region.”

There were 44 medical schools in the Caribbean with 30 of them being offshore institutions.