De jaarlijkse kwaliteitsevaluatie van de opleiding tot gynaecoloog in de Onderwijs- en Opleidingsregio Noord- en Oost-Nederland; de bruikbaarheid van evaluatiemethoden

There is increasingly recognition that it is important to evaluate the quality of medical education and training. In the Netherlands there is currently much debate on the evaluation of postgraduate specialist education. Within the Departments of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in the teaching hospitals in the north-eastern region of the Netherlands, the postgraduate education and training programme is evaluated annually by the trainees in order to maintain and improve educational quality. In this paper we describe our experiences with this annual evaluation and with several validated and non-validated evaluation methods. It is demonstrated that every method has its advantages and disadvantages. Traditional questionnaire-based methods and annual meetings in which all trainees and clinical teachers in a department discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the programme appear to be the methods of preference. Validated questionnaires, such as the PHEEM and CTEI, were found to have some additional value, but were not considered suitable to replace the traditional annual evaluation. It remains important to examine which evaluation methods are most effective in measuring and improving the educational quality of specialist training programmes. (Koops A, Eising HP, Franssen MTM, Jippes E, Mourits MJE, Van Lonkhuijzen LRCW. The annual evaluation of the quality of gynaecological specialist training programmes in the north-eastern region of the Netherlands. Dutch Journal of Medical Education 2009;28(1):29-35.)