Accreditation or Assimilation? A Postcolonial Critique of International Accreditation Standards in Health Professions Education: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Objective: As a scoping review, this article critically reviewed the research of international accreditation standards in health profession education (HPE) with a postcolonial lens, most of all through epistemic authority, curriculum standardi-zation and contextual adaptation.
Methodology: The review was conducted based on “Hilary Arksey and Lisa O'Malley structure with PRISMA-Sc R guidelines. Literature from 2010 to 2025 was searched across PubMed Scopus ERIC, Web of Science, and Google Scholar”. Findings from a thematic analysis of peer-reviewed articles, editorials, and policy papers were synthesized.
Results: Thirty-eight articles were included. Five themes took shape: global standardization; epistemic imbalance; con-textual conflicts in LMIC; institutional compliance and decolonial alternatives. In these findings, accreditation mecha-nisms were found to impose Western norms and systems of standards of educational quality upon contexts where they may not always be relevant, Mainly to the extent to which they were silent about capitalizing indigenous knowledge sys-tems and locally relevant health priorities.
Conclusion: International accreditation can strengthen quality assurance; however, without contextual adaptation, it may reinforce colonial patterns of knowledge dominance and institutional dependency. Future accreditation reforms should support equity, local autonomy, and diverse knowledge systems in HPE. 
Keywords: Health professions education, accreditation, WFME, postcolonialism, decolonization, medical education, curriculum reform, LMICs.