Clinical Skills Centers Standards

Introduction. Setting up “Clinical Skills Labs” has been started in some Iranian medical universities since five years ago. In an educational workshop for Clinical Skills Labs managers in January 2001, many managers stated that if there were standards for these centers it would help them define the necessities of the center. These standards would also make the basis for internal and external evaluation of these centers. Methods. In designing these standards the frame of the “international basic standards of medical schools” which was developed by World Federation for Medical Education has been used. The main areas of these standards were divided into six topics: Planning, Management, Students, Educational program, Evaluation of the program and Educational resources. The subtopics of each of these were determined too. Then the first edition of the standards was prepared by using the available educational and administrative resources and also the experiences of the experts of the “Deputy Ministry of education and university affairs”. The first edition was revised in three steps. The revised edition was sent to 12 medical universities to gather their opinion. These were chosen according to the evaluations of the Deputy Ministry of education and university affairs of Ministry of health and medical education. The edition was finalized by these universities’ opinions. The standards were divided into two levels: the essential and quality standards. The essential standards are the ones that should be necessarily observed in each step of establishment and development .The quality standards may be met during later developments of the center. Results. The results of this project were 30 essential standards and 21 quality standards for clinical skills centers, which were divided in 6 topics and 27 subtopics. Conclusion. Approved standards may be used in: developing precise plans for establishment and development of CSCs.internal evaluation of the CSCs external evaluation and accreditation