This coming April, it is time for another external assessment at ESHPM. ESHPM’s management and policy advisers are busy with all the preparations. A panel of external experts will visit campus Woudestein to assess the bachelor’s degree and the two local master’s degrees (Health Care Management/Zorgmanagement and Health Economics, Policy & Law). In this article, you can read more about the accreditation cycle at ESHPM and how you can contribute to it.
Independent quality assessment
If you offer a programme in the Netherlands that awards students a bachelor or master degree upon completion, it must be accredited by the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO). This is an independent organisation set up by the government to give an objective assessment of the quality of higher education.
Accreditation cycle
The accreditation of a programme is valid for six years. After that, the programme must be accredited again. Every six years, programmes must show that they still meet the quality requirements the NVAO sets for bachelor’s and master’s programmes. In the middle of this six-year period, it is common (and at many universities even mandatory) to organise an interim programme evaluation (tussentijdse opleidingsevaluatie, or TOE). In this evaluation, the programme managers review how the programme is doing, what is going well and what could be improved in the run-up to accreditation.
Preparations
Preparing for accreditation starts well in advance. The programme managers begins writing the internal evaluation a year ahead of time. The NVAO looks at the quality of a study programme using various standards. In the internal evaluation, the programme also reflects on these standards, what is going well regarding each one and what plans there still are for improvements. In effect, this internal evaluation offers an inside look at the programme.
The target audience of such an internal evaluation is a panel of experts gathered by the programme itself. This panel must be approved by the NVAO. There should be no close ties between the programme and the experts so as not to hamper the objectivity of the assessment.
External assessment
The panel not only reads the internal evaluation produced by the programme managers, but also comes to visit. This visit is called the external assessment. The external assessment takes one or two days, depending on how many programmes are evaluated at once. The upcoming assessment involves three ESHPM programmes, so two days have been allocated.
During these two days, the panel will speak with the programme managers (i.e. the Dean of the School, the Director of Education and the Programme Director). They will also speak with lecturers who play an important role in education, the programme’s examining board, students and alumni. The panel will ultimately decide from the internal evaluation and from the interviews whether, in its view, the programme meets the NVAO standards and is therefore of sufficient quality.
How you can contribute to the quality of our study programmes
For the external assessment, we are always looking for alumni who would enjoy talking about their experiences on the labour market after graduation and how they look back on their time at ESHPM.
If you have any questions about this article, or you would like to contribute to the accreditation process in the future, contact policy@eshpm.eur.nl.
