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Resolution for Diversity Accreditation Standards
Submitted by the Committee on Ethnic and Cultural Diversity

The APAP membership passed a motion relative to diversity authored by the Committee on Ethnic and Cultural Diversity (CECD) at the annual Education Forum this past November. The CECD motion, as well as comments submitted by PA programs, has been communicated to the ARC-PA. APAP thanks its member programs and the members of the CECD for their input. The text of the CECD motion follows:

Background

The ARC-PA has the responsibility of assuring the American public that physician assistant educational programs are of good quality and have the ability to produce clinicians who can provide quality health care. It is APAP’s responsibility to place and maintain the issue of PA education at the forefront of health professions education and assure the PA profession’s role in the future of health care education.

The ARC-PA’s proposed new standards fail to address the area of diversity within the PA profession. Over the past two years several key health care organizations have stressed the importance of addressing diversity within the health professions and applying requirements from the top down, including accreditation standards that address diversity.

  • In September 2003, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), the medical school counterpart of the ARC-PA, issued new standards for the nation’s medical schools. Specific standards were established that required each medical school to create strategies for increasing student and faculty diversity, as well as specific curricular requirements that would assure the cultural competency of students and faculty.1
  • In 2002 the American Psychological Association issued specific standards to ensure the diversity of student and faculty psychologists and required that they gain cultural competency, knowledge, and skills.2
  • A 2004 report issued by the Institute of Medicine, In the Nation’s Compelling Interest: Ensuring Diversity in the Health Care Workforce, recommended that accreditation bodies establish and enforce standards that dictate that each institution develop strategies to promote diversity that would also be in line with its mission.3
  • In the same vein, the recently released Sullivan Commission report entitled Missing Persons: Minorities in Healthcare, also recommended the establishment and enforcement of diversity and cultural competency standards.4
  • The Federation of Association of Schools of the Health Professions (of which APAP is a member) has also called for diversity and cultural competency accreditation standards, as well as institutional mission statements that support and promote diversity for each educational entity.

Be it resolved that APAP calls for the ARC-PA to adopt specific standards addressing the diversity among PA students and faculty, as well as cultural competency curriculum.

Suggested wording for such standards follow:

PA programs should have policies and practices addressing diversity of its student body and faculty.

B3.4: The program must provide instruction in: cultural issues and their impact on health care addressing both cognitive and affective domains.

Notes

1 Liaison Committee on Medical Education. Functions and Structure of a Medical School: Standards for Accreditation of Medical Education Programs Leading to the M.D. Degree. Sept 2003. Available at: http://www.lcme.org/functions2003september.pdf. Retrieved November 3, 2003; 18.

2 American Psychological Association, Committee on Accreditation. Guidelines and Principles for Accreditation of Programs in Professional Psychology. March 2002. Available at http://www.apa.org/ed/G&P2.pdf. Retrieved September 7, 2003.

3 Institute of Medicine. Preface: In the Nation’s Compelling Interest: Ensuring Diversity in the Health Care Workforce. Report of the Committee on Institutional and Policy-Level Strategies for Increasing the Diversity of the U.S. Healthcare Workforce. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; 2004.

4 Sullivan Commission. Missing Persons: Minorities in Healthcare. 2004. A report of the Sullivan Commission on Diversity in the Healthcare Workforce. Available at: http://www.sullivancommission.org.

 

 

 

 

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APAP Update - February 2005