THE FUTURE OF MEDICAL EDUCATION: MEETING THE GLOBAL STANDARDS

The main goal of medical education is to provide improved health to all.1 To work towards this goal and to enhance the quality of medical education, the World Medical Association (WMA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) established the World Federation for Medical Education (WFME) in 1972.2 It works to achieve its main goal by promoting high quality by initiating new learning methods, new instructional tools, and innovative management of medical education for almost 10 million physicians and students.1,3 To make sure that competencies of doctors are globally accepted, it is necessary to have readily accessible and transparent documentation of the quality of educational institutions and their programmes.1 In this context, WFME Global Standards, both basic and quality improvement standards (which are a global expert consensus), cover all three phases of medical education.2 These are basic medical education (comprising of 106 basic standards, 90 quality development standards and 127 annotations); postgraduate medical education (comprising of 161 basic standards, 94 quality development standards and 123 annotations); and continuing professional development (comprising of 76 basic standards, 62 quality development standards and 80 annotations). 2 The focus of this editorial, however, will be basic medical education