As the world faces mounting health challenges – climate-linked diseases, global pandemics, mental health crises, and entrenched inequalities – the way we educate health professionals must change. Technical excellence remains essential, but it is no longer sufficient. Today, health education must prepare graduates to navigate complexity, lead across cultures and systems, and advocate for human dignity, equity, and sustainability.
Despite this growing need, many universities and regulatory bodies continue to evaluate the quality of health education using outdated frameworks. Accreditation processes often emphasise infrastructure, academic outputs, and discipline-specific performance, while overlooking interprofessional collaboration, global health engagement, and students’ ability to act in diverse sociocultural contexts.
This gap reflects a deeper tension: the misalignment between what we measure and what we actually need. We must shift from asking only how knowledge is transmitted to asking what kind of professionals we are forming – and what impact they will have in a world that demands global solidarity.
Global footprint
A key concept that remains underexplored in health education is that of a ‘global footprint’: the positive, transnational impact that institutions have through their graduates, research, and outreach. This includes whether graduates are working in underserved communities, influencing global health policy, contributing to culturally competent care or collaborating across sectors and regions.
To address this, higher education systems must:
• Foster curriculum transformation grounded in global health challenges.
• Support international mobility and intercultural learning as standard components of professional formation.
• Build strategic partnerships that transcend academia, engaging with civil society, governments, and global health institutions.
• Incorporate global health competencies as a standard criterion in quality assurance frameworks.
By embedding these elements into educational structures, we not only enhance relevance and responsiveness but also reclaim higher education’s social mission: to form professionals who serve not just patients or populations but humanity as a whole.
It is time to redefine what quality means in health education – not only by looking inward at our curricula, but outward at the impact we leave behind.
Lilian Ferrer is director of global affairs in the faculty of medicine at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Felipe Heusser is dean of the faculty of medicine at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.