The Meeting of Dr. Arabkheradmand with the CEO of Accreditation Service for International Colleges(ASIC) for Monitoring the Accreditation activities at Tehran University of Medical Sciences(TUMS)

According to the Office of Vice-Chancellor for Global Strategies and International Affairs’ report, in this meeting that was held on January 27^th, 2016, Dr. Shabani, the director of International Affairs Development, Dr. Shiran, the director of Graduate Affairs of International Campus, Iran University of Medical Sciences and Ms. Azadi, The senior officer of International Accreditation attended the meeting. 

In the beginning, Ms. Azadi explained about the activities of Secretariat of International Quality Assurance and Accreditation Network (IQAAN) and expressed that TUMS and specifically the office of Vice-Chancellor for Global Strategies and International Affairs founded IQAAN with the purpose of amending and recognizing the areas for improvement. 

Ms. Azadi further explained that IQAAN consists of three layers: The steering committee for international accreditation of the university, the specialized committee of international accreditation of office of Vice-Chancellors and the international accreditation workgroup at schools. 

With regard to the fact that the international accreditation action plan of TUMS has been prepared, she added that in this four year plan doing the self-assessments, developing improvement plans based on the results of the self-assessments, improving the areas of strengths and weaknesses are supposed to be done. Ms. Azadi also talked about all the self-assessment activities of the university involving preparation of the forms and developing the improvement plans based on the results of self-assessments.

Dr. Arabkheradmand also talked about the overall accreditation activities of the university and pointed to the necessity of programmatic accreditation and the hospital accreditation of the university. 

Lee Hammond, the CEO of ASIC stated that the performance of TUMS has been significantly good. Mentioning that ASIC is only active in the field of institutional accreditation, Mr. Hammond expressed that he is willing to introduce other accreditation bodies that are active in the field of programmatic accreditation to TUMS. He also added that all the institutional or structural changes of the University should be reported to ASIC since all these changes will influence the reaccreditation of the university.