As of 2024, medical staff applying for certification by the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates to be able to work in the United States will have to have graduated from a medical school accredited according to globally accepted criteria, such as those of the World Federation for Medical Education (WFME).

The objective of this requirement is to promote the development and implementation of accepted and validated international standards for evaluating undergraduate medical education [¹,²].

In recent months, this has led several quality assurance agencies from different countries [³], such as the National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA), which is attached to the Spanish Ministry of Universities, to begin the procedure of applying to become a WFME-recognised agency and thus accredited to assess official medical studies seeking to obtain the federation’s international quality label.

The WFME label is a result of the common goal of the World Health Organisation and the WFME to assist national or regional institutions, organisations and agencies in establishing recognition and accreditation systems by authorising agencies to carry out the assessments required to obtain the WFME label in a process that can take up to 12 months and which involves the following steps:

The four faculties chosen by ANECA to participate in this first international WFME label accreditation project are those of the following universities: University of Castilla-La Mancha, Complutense University of Madrid, University of Malaga and University of Navarra. During the process by which the WFME authorises ANECA, the faculties of these universities will be evaluated in two phases: an evaluation by the visiting panel and the resolution by the accreditation committee during the months of December 2021 and June 2022.

During this process of authorisation of ANECA by the WFME, between 2021 and 2022, all the documentation that ANECA and the selected universities will have to use during the pilot scheme will be generated (specifically between June and November 2021). A technical subcommittee composed of national and international academics and professionals in the field of medicine will provide support in this phase.

The assessment model of this new label will be based on the application of the WFME criteria, in addition to those already established in general in the accreditation process of the other labels managed by ANECA since 2013, which are periodically audited by the international associations European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education, European Quality Assurance Network for Informatics Education and European Chemistry Thematic Network Association. They are also audited internally through an annual meta-evaluation of the International Quality Label Programme, in which these international accreditations are undertaken (ANECA) [³,⁴].

Within the context of the development of this new international and professional project, in the coming months ANECA will sign a cooperation agreement with the National Conference of Deans of Faculties of Medicine and the General Council of Official Medical Associations.

Excellence in higher education is related to the public and private consideration of training people to the highest level, a duality increasingly influenced by the internationalisation of higher education itself. Hence the importance of international accreditation in a context of open dialogue on the benefits and opportunities for the different stakeholders involved [⁵], with close collaboration among authorities, institutions and agencies at the local, national and global levels. In this direction, this ANECA project aims to carry out effective changes that make it possible to tackle the new challenges for health in the times in which we live, as well as to share resources and experiences [⁶], such as the benefits of these international accreditations (see the testimonies sent to ANECA from more than 30 universities, after having obtained labels similar to that of the WFME, at: http://www.aneca.es/eng/Evaluation-Activities/Evaluacion-de-titulos/SIC) [⁷].