gms | German Medical Science

16. Grazer Konferenz – Qualität der Lehre: Curriculum planning and assessment

19. - 21. April 2012, Timisoara, Romania

Willkommen

Dear Colleagues,

It is a special pleasure for me, for Jörg Stein and Marius Raica, as well as our hosts and co-organisers from the Victor Babes University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Timisoara, Romania as well as the Austrian Society for Didactics in Higher Education to welcome you to the 16th Graz Conference on medical education. Graz was the venue of the first conference that Jörg Stein and I organized in 1995 and we met there almost every year until 2004. Starting in 2005 the conference was hosted in turn by all Austrian Medical Universities. In 2011 the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna was the hosting institution.

But 2012 marks the first year that a university outside of Austria was selected as the venue for this conference. While the Graz Conference started unashamedly as an event tightly focused on the needs of Austrian medical schools, it had evolved over the years to encourage colleagues from outside Austria to participate. By 2005 all plenary lectures were held in English and starting 2006 at least one of the parallel workshops was offered in English. And more and more colleagues from abroad, mainly from eastern and south-eastern Europe, joined us.

This is a necessary step, since medical universities the worldwide face so many similar challenges. Thus we can and should attempt to learn from each other. Rumania was a good place to start, since there the medical universities in Timisoara, Cluj-Napoca, Iasi, Craiova and Targu-Mures, supported by the medical universities of Szeged and Vienna are partners in a EU-funded project, eMediqual, to improve all aspects of their educational program.

Not really part of this conference, but impossible to miss nevertheless, was the "Student's Symposium - eMediqual 2012" which took place at the same time as the Graz Conference. More than 250 Romanian students plus their invited colleagues from Austria and Hungary attended this remarkable medical education event, which covered topics and issues of particular interest to all participants. Some of the students contributed posters to the Graz conference and some of the speakers of the Graz Conference gave presentations at the Student's Symposium, which helped both events.

If you are interested in finding out more about this conference as well as past and future Graz conferences please visit the web site: http://grazconference.at/

Herbert Plass is the conference web-master and also edited the 2012 conference program booklet and those of recent years. The complete conference programs can be downloaded from the web site.

The conference gave us an opportunity to learn from our colleagues and to discuss new ideas. Please join us at next year’s conference, which will be take place at the Medical University of Innsbruck (back in Austria) 4. – 6. April 2013.

Richard Marz

Wissenschaftliches Programm