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CIDAFAM is an institution that was established in 2000, with the primary objective of addressing the quality of medical education in medical schools.
The mission of medical schools is to train professionals of excellence that can solve health problems, both individual and of the community, with strong emphasis regarding primary health care.
Besides the study of individual patients, the graduate is expected to have an active action in preventive medicine, both in acute and chronic diseases, caused by all kinds of noxae.
Highly prevalent diseases such as diabetes, arteriosclerosis, hypertension, some forms of depression, some tumors, and even some congenital malformations must be under permanent surveillance.
The study and treatment methods have improved significantly: drug development and achievements in cardiovascular surgery, microsurgery, endoscopic surgery and access to nuclear medicine.
The medical scenario has changed dramatically in recent years. Patients have more treatment options, are better informed and demand, quite rightly, the best we have to solve their problems. All this poses a challenge to medical schools, who should find the way to include new knowledge, which has grown dramatically in the last few years, while taking into account primary health care.
Part of the challenge is related to the fact that these new treatment techniques have significantly shortened hospital stay, the number of outpatients has increased, and medical schools must adapt their teaching methods to these new circumstances.
Each school should consider their regional needs and requirements.
The other issue to be addressed is the medical mobility. Never before has there been the possibility to travel and get inserted into other professional fields, either as graduates, in residency programs, for specialization, or for masters or PhD theses.
Students can also take certain subjects of the course or do part of the obligatory final practice at other universities, within their own country or abroad.
In recent years a large number of medical schools have been founded in countries of South America. Some schools are state-owned and others are private, ranging from high to very low levels of accomplishment. Some have taken into account the countries particular needs while others have only considered profit as their aim. That is why accreditation has become essential. Almost all countries have undertaken the difficult and sometimes controversial task of setting up quality standards that would lead to accredit medical studies. Among the key points to be decided are how long accreditation would be valid and the time to make the changes suggested by accreditation institutions. We can say that the problem of accreditation has been reasonably solved in many countries, but there is still the need to guarantee quality homogeneity at university level. This is the great task of CIDAFAM.
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