Social Accountability of the Curriculum in Medical Education: A Review on the Available Models

Background: Social accountability in the schools of medicine is very important. It is an essence to recognize the methods and models used and implemented in the world in order to make use of the results and experiences. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to review some models of social accountability in the world. Methods: The key words, including social accountability, faculty of medicine, and curriculum were searched in the data banks, Elsevier, PubMed, Elsevier, Eric, Google scholar ProQuest and also the Iranian data banks, including Magiran, and SID. Then, the extracted data were categorized. In total, 80 articles were found and after analysis of the abstracts only, 30 articles in relation with the topic were selected. Finally, only 10 articles were chosen that were about social accountability models. Results: Five models of social accountability are used in the faculties of medicine and medical curriculum in the world, including: CPU model, The NET model, AIDER model, ASPIRE model, and CARE model. These models adapt functional approaches in order to upgrade the ability of social accountability among learners and providers of health services.  Conclusions: In fact, social accountability should be established as a culture among students and teachers. Introducing the current approaches in the world and their results, could be influential in the universities of Iran in order to establish the requirements and provide changes in educational curriculum. Among the five models, CARE model is recommended to be implemented and assessed in the schools of medicine of Iran, it should be noted that this model could be more consistent with the educational system of Iran.