Biomedical/clinical engineering education and certification: fifty years of actions

Health care is today technology driven and biomedical engineering is behind the impressive developments that reshaped medicine during the last 50 years. Biomedical Engineers (BMEs) as professionals are playing a vital role during the whole life cycle of Medical Devices (MDs), from the innovative idea to their final use and decommissioning. This rapid evolution creates a constant pressure for new knowledge and skills for the BMEs and therefore for continuous curriculum updates of education in BME, to meet current trends and market demands. Biomedical Engineering is relatively new when compared with other engineering disciplines. The earliest programs during the 1970s, most of which were at Doctoral and M.Sc. levels. B.Sc. programs were developed in most European Universities from the 1990s. Today there is an impressive trend to create new programs and the number of higher education institutions offering a BME degree is almost two hundred, just in Europe. Although biomedical engineering is playing a vital role in innovation, development, maintenance, and safe use of medical technology, BMEs are not yet recognized as a distinct professional entity and do not appear in the International Labour Organisation (ILO) lists. This is partly because biomedical engineering covers a very broad domain and includes professionals with very heterogeneous areas of specialization. Unlike in other engineering fields, where certification is a prerequisite for being a licensed professional, even for the clinical engineering, certification is not widely applied. This is mainly due to the lack of motivation since certification is not mandatory. In contrast with other health care professionals, that cannot practice their profession if they are not officially registered, such requirement does not exist for clinical engineers. In the present paper a review of the developments in BME educational programs in Europe, fifty years long, is attempted, focusing on some important initiatives and actions well known to the author. Additionally, some aspects of Clinical Engineering certification are addressed.