[Quality of undergraduate, graduate and continuing medical education]

There are only a few studies exploring the quality of undergraduate, graduate and continuing medical education, and there is no systematic approach to evaluating the different spheres of competence--knowledge, medical skills and attitudes. Medical state examination results are not appropriate for assessing the quality of medical education. The implementation of statutory continuing medical education requires quality assurance of its contents, which so far has not been implemented. In the majority of hospitals there is a lack graduate medical education programmes. Future challenges that have to be addressed include important problem areas such as standardized evaluation, recruitment of qualified junior researchers, dealing with the Bologna process, teaching the teachers, quality assurance in continuing medical education and lifelong learning. Since a correlation must be assumed between poor knowledge of the quality of undergraduate, graduate and continuing medical education and the quality of this education itself, we need to close the gap of knowledge relating to the quality of medical education.