Perguruan Tinggi Diminta Tingkatkan Kualitas Lulusan Dokter dan Tenaga Kesehatan
Perguruan Tinggi Diminta Tingkatkan Kualitas Lulusan Dokter dan Tenaga Kesehatan
Medical education administrators joining Medical Education Agency for Regional Southeast Asia and East Mediterrania discuss efforts to improve the quality of doctors and paramedics generated by higher education institutions through the improvement of accrediting institutes that are overseen by World Federation for Medical Education (WFME).
This emerged in an international conference, 5th Searame The South East Asia Regional Association of Medical Education (SEARAME) in Hotel Sheraton Yogyakarta, organised from 7-8 May.
Initiated by UGM Faculty of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing, the conference was joined by 22 medical education agency representatives from Indonesia, Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa, North and South America, Southeast Asia, and East Mediterrania in addition to 30 medical education administrators from Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Greek, Myanmar, and Timor Leste.
President of SEARAME Indonesia, Titi Savitri PhD., told journalists that members of medical education agency of each region agreed to improve the quality of health profession education. She said each country had an accrediting agency separated from the state and the supervision of which is done by the WFME.
She explained the WFME had a recognition programme to evaluate accrediting agencies that will assess the medical education institutions.
“This is done to enhance the capacity of accrediting agency of each country,” she added.
This in turn will improve the medical education administration and teaching as required. “We want to enhance the quality of the graduating doctors and paramedics according to the required standards so that the graduates are competent,” she said.
According to Titi, in Indonesia an independent accrediting agency for Indonesian higher learning had been formed since 2014. It has continuously been enhanced to improve accreditation assessment process of higher education institutions that offer medical and paramedic education profession.
“What has been done by Indonesia will serve as a model elsewhere,” she said.
On the issue of the lack of doctors in some countries, David Gordon said this happened in many countries. Some other countries even had more but lack of competence.
“A certain country in America has extra numbers, but their quality is not as good as in other places,” he said.
Titi saw the number of doctors in Indonesia was more than enough if seen from the number of medical graduates each year. They are, however, not yet equally distributed to different areas of the country.
“Distribution has yet to be equally spread, many work in urban areas but there is just a few outside of Java and isolated areas. In fact, as many as 1,700 community health centres have no doctors,” she said.