Social Accountability of Medical Education Curriculum: Barriers and Implications

Introduction: Social accountability of curriculum is considered as the director of all medical education activities towards the training of medical practitioners who could be able to contribute to health needs of a population. This study tried to investigate some barriers to medical education social accountability and summarize the experimental based proposals and recommendations in international literature on social accountability program to aware stakeholders and curriculum planners. Methods: We searched for all papers published from 2000 to 2013 in Pubmed, Elsevier, Springer, and Proquest databases as well as Google scholar search engine. Search strategy included the words of social sccountability, medical education, clinical teaching, and curriculum in the article title abstract or keywords. Results: Thirty seven related articles totally were found and investigared. In order to conclude the results, we defined the concept of social accountability and point eight major obstacles in development of social acoountability, and then we discussed different models for evaluation of programs’ social efficacy. Finally the recommended implications are argued. Conclusion: There are several structural obstacles in universities that have to be eliminated in order to develop social accountability in medical education. A number of recommendations have been made in order to help institutions make the programs accountable but they are the results of personal experiences of researchers. These should be investigated and studied more to be examined regarding their effectiveness in educational systems. Directing educational studies into accountabilitry in medical education is a necessity.