Measuring social responsiveness of medical schools: a case study from Thailand.
Thailand has 13 medical schools, one of which is private. Graduates of the 12 government medical schools must provide service in rural areas for three years after graduation. The Chulalongkorn University Faculty of Medicine (Chulalongkorn Medical School) pursues social responsibility in various ways. For example, it has multiple tracks for student admission, includes a curricular track designed to produce doctors for rural areas, has revised curriculum to make it more relevant to social needs, chooses clinical teaching sites with such needs in mind, and works closely with relevant institutions in the government and elsewhere. Until recently, Thai medical schools evaluated their social responsiveness informally. This evaluation has become much more systematic, however, since 1996, when the Ministry of University Affairs issued policies and guidelines for quality assurance in higher education. As a member of the International Working Party for Measuring the Social Accountability of Medical Schools, Chulalongkorn Medical School recently used the social accountability grid to help assess its performance. It found its social responsiveness to be outstanding in the educational domain, fair in the research domain, and good in the service domain.
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Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.
D003479:Curriculum; D006801:Humans; D019982:Organizational Case Studies; D012577:Schools, Medical / Q000458:organization & administration*; D012941:Social Responsibility; D013785:Thailand