Dr Iqbal Ahmed Professor of Psychiatry has been appointed as a member of ACGME Residency Review Committee for Psychiatry. Dr. Ahmed is a leader in the field of geriatric psychiatry, serving as editor and contributing author on the American Psychiatric Association's Ethnic Minority Elderly Curriculum in 2006. Dr. Ahmed has chaired influential committees within AAGP and in the American Psychiatric Association that have moved the discipline toward greater awareness about the needs of our elders.Dr Ahmed is the recepient of many national awards .He is Faculty Psychiatrist, Tripler Army Medical Center Honolulu, Hawaii and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Geriatric Medicine, University of Hawaii.
As a member,he will be meeting with the committee twice a year to review residency training policies. These will be undergoing some major changes as to how residents will be evaluated which is known as the Milestones project. Other medical specialties will also be going through this process. Dr Ahmed will be also assigned to look at a certain number of reports of site visitors to different programs and give input to the rest of the committee so decisions can be made about continued accreditation, problem areas etc. The appointment is for 3-6 years. Dr Ahmed is one of the 20 members (from different parts of the country (USA)-primarily educators, chairs, and residency directors) of the psychiatry residency review committee which set the residency requirements for psychiatry and oversees the accreditation of the more than 180 psychiatry residency programs in the country by reviewing the reports of the site visitors sent by ACGME to visit the programs, and from the program data sent by the programs themselves.
The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) is a private professional organization responsible for the accreditation of 8,887 residency education programs. Residency education is the period of clinical education in a medical specialty that follows graduation from medical school, and prepares physicians for the independent practice of medicine. The ACGME's volume of accredited programs makes it one of the largest private accrediting agencies in the country, if not the world.
Stakeholders of the ACGME's accreditation process are residency programs, their sponsoring institutions, residents, medical students, the specialty boards of the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS), patients, payers, government and the general public. Accreditation offers these stakeholders assurance that a given residency program and its sponsoring institutions meet an accepted set of educational standards. The ACGME accredits residency programs in 133 specialty and subspecialty areas of medicine, including all programs leading to primary Board certification by the 24 member boards of the American Board of Medical Specialties.To develop and refine its accreditation standards and to review accredited programs for compliance with the standards, the ACGME relies on experts in the various medical specialties. Twenty-six specialty-specific committees, known as Residency Review Committees (RRCs), periodically initiate revision of the standards and review accredited programs in each specialty and its subspecialties.
Congratulations Dr Ahmed.
