MED-NET Conferences 1998, Lille & 1999, Maastricht
Anthology of presentations 6.2.

Evaluation -often a misunderstood aspect of quality management

J. Rotgans (Aachen, Germany)

In the Federal Republic of Germany there are 36 state and 1 private Medical School. All schools have the same uniform curriculum. This curriculum results form the Regulation to License Doctors ("Approbations-ordnug fur Arzte"). It is characterised by its traditional departmentally defined structure and teacher-oriented education strategies. Freedom of teaching and research is the fundamental and exclusive right of each academic teacher. This fact and the underlying concepts of ‘teaching to transfer knowledge’ and ‘teaching to organise students’ learning’ explains why no need is felt to assess quality to teaching. So, evaluation procedures are neither at hand nor practised formally.

Fundamental academic independence let federal and state governments decide to encourage individual teachers, especially stakeholders (the so called C4-professor. who is always departmental head and powerful clinic or institute director simultaneously), to interest themselves to study modern educational theories and to introduce its inherent educational and quality managing concepts. This is done by various programmes which give the opportunity to increase budgets and staff for this purpose.

Because of the underlying incomplete, mostly implicit assumptions, in December 1996, the German Society for Medical Education decided to install the Working Group Evaluation. Task of this working group is not only to develop recommendations for medical schools how to evaluate the quality of their teaching, their curriculum and its effectiveness for student learning or to develop concepts of quality management, but also and especially to encourage faculties to develop themselves towards managers of change. The operationalisation of this task will be influenced certainly by the Advice to Strengthen Education in Universities by Evaluation which has been published by the Scientific Council of the Federal Government in September 1997.

The need for establishing the Reference Group ‘Quality Management’

In most European countries evaluations of medical schools are already introduced or its introduction is to be expected within short time. In several countries, as in the Federal Republic of Germany, the instrument of evaluations will be used to apply pressure on faculties to increase the quality of education, either on an organisational or a personal base. Here, the dimension of the evaluation instrument is simply students evaluation of lectures.

Used to think and handle as traditional teachers – who are still in a large amount from generations before the Cognitive Revolution in the Sixties, or who belong to the young generation which is unfamiliar with the new model of information processing by the human mind - a suspicious climate is the result.

After a short time of pride or frustration successful strategies are developed to manage student’s opinion. Within this short sighted scope, faculty will not see itself as a (learning) organisation which obliged itself to the principle of Continuous Process Improvement within the context of Integrated Quality Management. A struggle for life and not a struggle for quality (to avoid failures) will result; just as blindness for what one is doing, thinking, handling, etc. Self-evaluation is avoided because of fear to become confronted with reality, with weaknesses. Peer-review is damned. To avoid c.q. to cure this condition and to show that the outcome of evaluations will give structural help to monitor and guide the process of organisational development successfully MED-NET established the Reference Group Quality Management. Its primarily task is to inventory the quality management instruments of all European medical schools. From the results of this survey next steps will be prepared.

ISBN Number 90.805758.1.X

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