Accreditation is fundamental to PA education. It provides external assurance of educational quality, promotes accountability, protects students, and strengthens public confidence in the profession.
PAEA brings its expertise in PA education, understanding of program experience, and insights from research and higher education to the accreditation conversation, with a focus on how the system can best serve programs, institutions, students, the profession, and the public.
The PAEA Board of Directors has developed a belief statement and guiding principles that describe its vision for a fair, transparent, consistent, and improvement-oriented approach to accreditation.
Together, the principles describe the conditions the Board believes are essential to a credible accreditation system: one that provides assurance of educational quality, protects students and the public, supports continuous improvement and responsible innovation, treats programs fairly, and remains sustainable.
What Informed the Principles
The Board’s work is informed by member experience, comparative research, and external expertise.
PAEA has engaged program directors, faculty, senior academic leaders, national accreditation scholars, experts from other health professions, and institutional accrediting organizations to better understand accreditation practices and approaches to educational quality assurance.
Member experience is central to that work.
PAEA’s 2022 Membership Market Survey identified stronger advocacy and enhanced accreditation support as important member needs. Through surveys, listening sessions, roundtables, and conversations with program leaders, PAEA has continued to learn how programs experience accreditation in practice.
Programs consistently affirm the importance of rigorous external review and public accountability. They have also identified challenges and opportunities related to:
- Clarity and consistency in the interpretation of accreditation standards and expectations
- Transparency and predictability in accreditation processes
- Understanding what successful compliance looks like
- Differences in site visit experiences among programs
- Direct accreditation costs and the broader institutional resources required to navigate accreditation
- Uncertainty and perceived risk associated with pursuing innovative approaches
- Experiences with communication and formal review, appeal, and complaint processes
These member experiences are informing PAEA’s ongoing research, including an examination of accreditation approaches across health professions to better understand where the PA experience aligns with or differs from selected peer models.
What Credible Accreditation Must Do
Taken together, PAEA’s guiding principles describe the conditions the Board believes are essential to a credible accreditation system. The principles form an integrated framework and should be understood together.
A credible accreditation system must do more than verify compliance. It must provide assurance that programs prepare graduates for entry to practice; protect students and the public; set clear expectations; provide fair review and accountable governance; support continuous improvement; allow responsible innovation; and ensure requirements support quality without creating unnecessary burden.
The principles emphasize:
Clear and consistent expectations
Programs should understand what is expected of them and experience consistent interpretation and application of accreditation standards.
Fairness, transparency, and accountability
Accreditation processes and decisions should be fair and transparent, with clear expectations for how compliance is assessed and meaningful opportunities for review.
Continuous improvement
Accreditation should hold programs accountable to rigorous standards while supporting their responsibility for continuous improvement in educational quality.
Responsible innovation
Accreditation should establish common outcomes and appropriate safeguards without prescribing a single path to achieving them. Programs should have room to adapt to their missions, learners, workforce needs, and communities, provided they explain their rationale, monitor outcomes, and demonstrate quality.
Sustainable quality assurance
Accreditation should maintain rigorous oversight while ensuring that requirements and the resources needed to demonstrate compliance are proportionate to their quality-assurance value.
The full Belief Statement and Guiding Principles describe these interconnected principles in greater detail.
PAEA’s Ongoing Work on Accreditation
PAEA’s work includes collecting and analyzing program feedback, examining the regulatory and legal landscape, researching approaches across health professions education, developing evidence-based recommendations, and creating opportunities for members and partners to engage in discussion.
CHEA Submission | August 2024
As part of the Council on Higher Education Accreditation’s open re-recognition process for ARC-PA, PAEA launched a member feedback initiative to ensure PA programs’ experiences could be formally documented and shared. Approximately one-third of programs participated in the mixed-methods study, providing a broad view of members’ perceptions and experiences with PA accreditation. PAEA submitted a summary of the aggregated findings to CHEA and shared the results with PA program leadership in October 2024.
Read an executive summary and the full report in the PAEA Member Community.
Direct Testimony | November 2024
PAEA CEO Sara Fletcher, PhD, presented findings from the member research directly to the CHEA re-recognition committee, bringing documented program experiences and evidence-based recommendations into the re-recognition process.
Voices of PA Education | Launched April 2025
PAEA’s “Voices of PA Education” roundtable series brought program leaders together to share accreditation experiences, learn from one another, and identify questions and priorities.
These conversations help PAEA better understand how accreditation is experienced across different programs and institutions and provide members with another opportunity to inform our work.
A History of Engagement on Accreditation
PAEA has been engaged in conversations about accreditation and educational quality for more than a decade. Throughout that time, the Association has gathered member input, conducted research, explored accreditation models, and shared recommendations.
- 2015: PAEA established the Generative Accreditation Taskforce to develop a vision for accreditation reform in anticipation of revisions to the Standards for Accreditation.
- 2016: The Accreditation Taskforce called for an outcomes-based, profession-defined accreditation model. PAEA also hosted role-based roundtables at the Education Forum to assist ARC-PA in gathering input for the fifth edition of the accreditation Standards.
- 2016: PAEA participated in the National Academies of Medicine Global Forum on “Exploring the Role of Accreditation in Enhancing Quality and Innovation in Health Professions Education.” Read the workshop proceedings.
- 2017: PAEA met with ARC-PA leadership to discuss stronger collaboration and outcomes-based accreditation. Read PAEA’s recommendations.
- 2020: PAEA’s Board of Directors created a new Accreditation Work Group to assess accreditation challenges and develop strategies to address members’ concerns.
- 2020: During the COVID-19 pandemic, PAEA shared evidence-based models from AAMC and other health professions accreditors that demonstrated approaches to balancing educational quality with pandemic-related adaptations with ARC-PA and the PA education community.
- 2021: PAEA’s “Best Practices and Trends in Programmatic Health Professions Education” report documented evidence-based approaches to quality assurance across health professions education.
- 2021-2024: PAEA continued gathering program feedback, conducting research, and pursuing opportunities for dialogue on accreditation.
- 2025: PAEA launched the “Voices of PA Education” roundtable series and other efforts to create additional opportunities for programs to share their experiences.
Continuing the Conversation
Publishing the Belief Statement and Guiding Principles is the beginning of a broader conversation with PAEA members and partners about the future of accreditation in PA education.
PAEA will invite our members to review the principles, share their perspectives, ask questions, and identify areas that warrant further discussion. We will share what we are hearing from members and explain how that input is informing the work.
PAEA will also continue engaging accreditation partners and others across higher education. We recognize there may be different perspectives on how best to achieve shared goals, and we welcome constructive dialogue about where there is alignment, where questions remain, and how accreditation can continue to evolve in support of PA education.
PAEA’s focus remains on what accreditation must provide and support: credible assurance of high-quality PA education and graduates prepared for entry to practice; protection for students and the public; clear, consistent, and accountable processes; and an environment that supports continuous improvement and responsible innovation.
We will continue working with members and partners across the profession to advance these priorities and strengthen PA accreditation.