Quality of education
Further quality improvement of education with quality funds
By converting the basic grant for students, an extra, gradually increasing amount of approximately € 0.9 to € 1.2 million is available for the Faculty of Medicine of UMC Utrecht each year from 2019 until 2024 to further improve the quality of education. This is what is called quality funds. In 2019, together with students and lecturers, we drew up a multi-year spending plan which we have adjusted twice within the period with the agreement of the Works Council . In 2023 we once again made use of the quality funds to invest in student wellbeing and student development. For instance, we made extra coaches and a training offer available and continued to improve these. The K.I.C.K. Start program , which ran for the third time, was also financed with these funds. In addition, we continued to develop a variety of innovations in education. Examples include activating working methods, inter-professional and interdisciplinary (project) education, ‘research-based learning’ (RBL), and Virtual Reality (VR). We are also focusing on the professionalization of lecturers: for example the (further) development of the educational qualifications BKO/SKO/KKO and the partial qualification, Implementation of Education (UvO). Lastly, we organized tailored lecturer-professionalization activities such as intervision and image coaching, and a faculty training day for tutors.
NPO Medicine mitigates COVID consequences for students
In line with the spending plan, in the first part of 2023 we spent the remainder of the National Plan for Education (NPO): Medicine (a total of over € 750,000 for 2022 and 2023) on catching up on backlogs in waiting times for apprenticeships. For this we appointed an extra clinical education physician, in addition to the six others plus secretarial support whom we had already appointed in 2022. The actions we took in 2022 and in the first part of 2023 were successful. Since the 2023-2024 academic year the situation has returned to what it was before COVID-19 and we are no longer offering extra apprenticeships. We continue to make use of extra (e-learning) education that we developed from NPO resources when students drop out for instance due to illness. In 2023 we furthermore started with the action ‘Learning about Workplace Learning’, for which there appeared to be a significant need among students. It is a multi-year program for students in the master’s phase, in which they are guided to identify learning opportunities in the workplace and to make optimal use thereof. If the pilot is successful, this course will become a definitive part of our Medical training.
