The Bologna process, medical education and integrated learning

Abstract

The Bologna Declaration, signed in 1999 by all European Ministers of Education and currently in a phase of active implementation in Europe, specifies a three-cycle degree structure – Bachelor's, Master's, Doctorate – for all disciplines in Higher Education. The application of this model to medical education has been opposed on various grounds. In particular, a ‘Ba/Ma’ model for undergraduate medical degrees has been viewed as undoing recent progress towards fully integrated learning of basic and clinical medical sciences. However, this can be overcome by the use of a learning outcomes framework, agreed at European level, that reinforces the primarily medical nature of both degrees and which requires integrated teaching, learning and assessment at every stage. With this proviso, application of the Bologna principles to medicine can help to drive educational development and quality enhancement in European medical education.

Notes

1. For the purposes of current work on European medical degrees, the following definitions of ‘learning outcomes’ and ‘competences’ are applied. Learning outcomes are set and described by teaching staff, and in this case refer to the whole degree programme and relate to the point of graduation. They are normally described with a hierarchy of levels, with a top level consisting of large domains of learning, and more detailed outcomes within each of them. Competences are acquired by, and belong to, students or graduates. For a graduate who has successfully completed a degree programme, their competences should be at least equivalent to the prescribed learning outcomes. Thus when referring to the point of graduation, identical descriptors can be used. In this paper, the term ‘learning outcomes’ will be used.

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Notes on contributors

Allan Cumming

ALLAN CUMMING BSc, MBChB, MD, FRCP is Director of Undergraduate Learning and Teaching and Professor of Medical Education, University of Edinburgh, and a nephrologist in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. In the MEDINE Thematic Network he led the Tuning (medicine) Task Force, which developed learning outcomes/competences for European medical graduates (http://tuning-medicine.com).