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Current Products and Practice |
In 1992, the EUR-QUAL I project commenced. The project was funded by the European Commission. Its mission and objectives were ‘to support the orthodontic professional in Europe in improving the quality of care’. As a result of the project, a series of policy statements on all aspects of orthodontic care were produced. In 1995, the European Commission funded the next phase of the project—EURO-QUAL II—as part of the BIOMED 2 programme. The objective of EURO-QUAL BIOMED 2 has been to develop a quality improvement system for orthodontic care. A team of orthodontists, teachers and administrators drawn from all the member states of the European Union plus Norway, Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, and Slovenia was formed to work towards fulfilling the objective. The team divided into six groups (Quality Manual, Data Base, Industrial Cooperation, Consumer Satisfaction, Financial Resources, and Professional Development), each of which has worked on an aspect of quality improvement.
The Professional Development Group (PDG) consisted of:
In March 1996, PDG was tasked with formulating guidelines, which could be accepted throughout Europe, with a view to harmonizing the quality and content of the different educational programmes in all aspects of orthodontics in Europe.
The PDG reviewed the published literature on all aspects of orthodontic training and education in Europe, and produced a series of brief position papers, which were circulated to all other members of the EURO-QUAL BIOMED II project for comments. It was concluded that there was insufficient information on current training programmes and practices for many countries. It was therefore decided to carry out surveys to assess aspects of the following topics:
The PDG designed questionnaires on these five topics and piloted them within the group. The questionnaires were then distributed to all members of the EURO-QUAL BIOMED II project and/or orthodontic teachers from countries not represented, together with an explanatory letter. Responses were obtained from all member states of the European Union (EU) and from all countries with project team members.
The responses were validated by the members of the PDG with the respondents, either in person, during the March 1998 meeting of members of the EURO-QUAL BIOMED II project when the authors were able to interview the majority of the respondents in person, or by further correspondence with those who did not attend the meeting.
In the U.K., a solely postal questionnaire on dental education had a poor response rate (Vaughan, 1992
). There were over 130 dental schools in the 15 countries of the European Union and a further 40 in the other 13 European countries involved in the EURO-QUAL BIOMED II project. A recent questionnaire survey of EU dental schools reported a 23 per cent response to a questionnaire (Shanley et al., 1997) and anecdotal evidence suggested similar response levels to similar questionnaires in the past. As stated in the previous paragraph, it was therefore decided to distribute the questionnaires only to members of the EURO-QUAL BIOMED II project or to identified orthodontic teachers from the 28 countries and not to send them to all 170 dental schools in the 28 countries. It was appreciated that this approach ran the risk that respondents could give answers which related only to their own dental schools, rather than to their country as a whole. To minimize this risk, the validation exercise, in which respondents were asked to confirm that as far as possible the answers they had given were true for their countries as a whole, rather than just for their own schools, was performed. Validated responses to four of the five questionnaires were received from 23 countries: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Validated responses were received from 22 countries (there was no response from Slovakia) to the questionnaire on orthodontic auxiliary training. It was not possible to validate the responses received from a further five countries: Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. Data from these five countries are therefore not presented in the series of papers which follow this introduction.
The PDG formulated suggested guidelines, in the light of the information gathered. These guidelines cover all the topics listed above with the exception of ‘current problems’. However, although not the topic of a questionnaire, it was felt that guidelines should be suggested on ‘communication skills’ as within the group there was unanimous agreement that they were generally badly taught or not taught at all, and are critical to all aspects of orthodontic education and the provision of orthodontic care.
The draft guidelines and the results of the questionnaires were circulated to all members of the EURO-QUAL BIOMED II project and to a wide range of European national and international bodies involved in the provision, funding, and organization of orthodontic education and training for comment. They have undergone amendment in the light of these comments.
References
Shandley, D. B., Barna, S., Gannon, P., Kelly, A., Teljeur, C., Munck, C. and Ray, K. (1997) Undergraduate training in the European Union—convergence or divergence? European Journal of Dental Education, 1, 35–43.
Vaughan, A. G. (1992) Continuing education—an approach to organising a course, Dental Update, 19, 216–219.[Medline]
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