Proposal for accreditation of pharmacy careers in Latin America

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According to global forums, accreditation is the most widely used quality assurance method in education. Accreditation is the result of a process whereby a governmental, state‐owned, or private entity – known as an accreditation, or accrediting, body – evaluates the quality of an institution of higher education as a whole, for the purpose of formally and publicly recognizing that said institution fulfills previously established criteria or standards and granting a seal of approval. The impact of pharmacy education on the health of a country makes universities commit all of their efforts to the purpose of achieving the best education for their graduates, particularly when society demands greater commitment from professionals and when universities should show a greater commitment to society. At this point where needs converge, accreditation ensures a specific level of quality in accordance with the mission of the institution, the objectives of the program, and the expectations of the various players involved, including students and employers. Accreditation based on standards specific to the pharmacy career is the path to obtaining the quality that this career requires, as it enables targeting of resources and actions toward the indicators that will have the greatest impact on this career, distinguishing them from those specific to other health careers. The contextualization presented herein provides a notion of the status of accreditation in each country of the Region and could serve as an input to ascertain the work that remains to be done in each nation. The present document describes the principles of the accreditation system, i.e., the cornerstones on which the accreditation process is built (some writings define these as criteria, but we prefer to define them as characteristics or principles, so as to distinguish them from the meaning of “criterion” as a subcategory of components); describes the stages of the accreditation process, which are common to all countries; and proposes specific dimensions, components, criteria, indicators, and standards for the pharmacy career undergraduate education as a way of contributing to the efforts that each country has carried out in this field and recommending that accreditation should take into account the context of the national higher education system. It bears stressing that, in the globalized economy, the use of similar quality standards for the accreditation of pharmacy careers is important for mutual recognition of professional qualifications, which enables institutional, national, and regional mobility among students. Again, the hard work of the participating representatives of the countries of the Region should be regarded as a proposal for each country, based on the argument that accreditation should be contextualized.