Glocalization: A Critical Imperative for Health Professions Education and Practice

Health Professions Education (HPE) is experiencing an increasing need to balance globally influenced standards with the realities of local training environments. This tension reflects wider debates about glocalization, which has become an increasingly forceful discourse shaping political, economic, and institutional expectations worldwide. The local contexts with a significant backdrop of global ambits have led to the processes that are acceptable by the users and still relevant to the globally defined norms. ‘Think globally and act locally’ has strategically shaped up to be known as ‘Glocalization’. HPE has been among the frontrunners who have adopted Glocalization to bridge the global frameworks with local adaptation. Educational practices, international partnerships, and workforce policies are all influenced by global flows of people, ideas, and institutional norms. Originally used within social theory and business contexts, glocalization has led the healthcare academia to particularize educational tendencies to the universally defined academic structures. Health professions educators often question the disjunction between globally endorsed standards of governing curricula, accreditation, teaching and learning practices and assessment with their applicability in their local, diverse contexts, especially in the Global South. Although these models, predominantly developed within Western contexts, have exerted considerable influence, their direct transplantation into other settings may limit their effectiveness and fail to adequately address local educational needs and sociocultural realities. Further critiques question the transferability of pedagogical methods and the risks of applying educational models from culturally dominant settings without regard for local meaning.

That said, more insight and research work is needed, on how HPE programs can operationalize the elements of glocalization. How can Glocalization ensure respect for local socio-cultural norms, include resource realities and health system priorities while aligning with globally recognized competencies and standards. Moreover, while global health education frameworks provide useful starting points, they often focus on ‘global’ dimensions (disease burden, equity, cross-border issues) without sufficiently addressing how curricular design can integrate these with deeply local training imperatives.

From the perspective of the broader body of work in healthcare academia, understanding glocalization matters because it speaks to sustainable educational reform, mutual relevance (for students, patients, health systems) and equity in global health workforce development. Research in this area can illuminate how to avoid both the pitfalls of uncritically importing external models and the isolation of hyper-localized curricula that miss global linkage.

This Research Topic explores the crucial role of glocalization in Health Professions Education (HPE), focusing on how global standards and competencies can be effectively and ethically integrated with diverse local contexts. We aim to understand the practical strategies, innovations, and challenges involved in adapting globally endorsed educational frameworks, pedagogical models, and assessment tools to align with specific socio-cultural realities, resource constraints, and health system priorities. Our objective is to illuminate how HPE programs can simultaneously meet local needs and maintain internationally recognized benchmarks, thereby preparing graduates for practice that is both deeply rooted in their communities and globally informed. This includes strengthening ethical international engagement, fostering contextual sensitivity in interpreting global principles, and ensuring that educational reforms are sustainable and socially accountable. While welcoming contributions from all settings, we place particular emphasis on glocalization processes and their impact within the Global South.

Ultimately, this collection seeks to advance context-responsive and globally informed educational reforms across all health professions, contributing to a more nuanced global dialogue on the consequences and purposes of international collaboration in HPE.

Here's a list of welcomed manuscript themes, but not limited to:
- Curriculum Design and Adaptation: Strategies for contextualizing global competencies and learning outcomes to specific local needs.
- Accreditation and Quality Assurance: Bridging global accreditation standards with local regulatory and quality improvement frameworks.
- Faculty Development: Preparing educators for glocalized teaching, learning, and assessment approaches.
- Interprofessional Training: Adapting interprofessional education models to diverse local team structures and healthcare contexts.
- Educational Resource Equity: Innovations in adapting and distributing educational resources, including digital tools, considering local access and infrastructure.
- Student Mobility: Preparing graduates for global practice while ensuring local relevance, including the impact of international exchanges.
- Digital and Assessment Adaptation: Developing culturally sensitive and locally relevant digital learning tools and assessment methods.
- Social Accountability: Mechanisms for ensuring HPE programs respond to community health needs and local workforce demands.
- Scalability Across Contexts: Strategies for implementing and scaling glocalized educational reforms effectively.
- Ethical International Engagement: Models for equitable and sustainable partnerships in glocalized HPE initiatives.

The types of manuscript for the current Research Topic could be any one of the following:

- Curriculum, Instruction and Pedagogy
- Mini Review
-Opinion
- Original Research
- Perspective
- Policy and Practice Reviews
- Policy Brief
- Review
- Systematic Review
-Technology and Code

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Glocalization, Glocalization in HPE, Contextualized Competency Framework, Global-Local, Social Accountability

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.