[The educational process of the "competent physician": quality exigencies]

The spread of Quality concepts and process control in industries and services has meant that the educational field has become increasingly affected by the concepts of activities optimization and quality assurance. Teaching is comparable to any other service supplied in terms of program quality, quality control, quality assurance, and quality management. Teaching is a service that can be supplied through a number of phases: planning, execution and evaluation or control. This paper aims to describe an application of the Quality concept according to ISO 9000 rules in order to assure quality of teaching and training of the occupational physician. The occupational physician is requested to act according to particular competencies. This implies the need to meet specific requirements (competence-based educational goals). To assure the achievement of these goals, the implementation of a teaching Quality system must include: targeting the learning objectives (knowledge, skills and attitudes the specialist should have); planning the evaluation system (ability of the course to assure the objectives are achieved); evaluating the curriculum (relating the acquired competencies to the needs). From the integration between Quality concepts and education, new rules are arising to comply with the quality needs in teaching, where the quality of the teaching program is considered as the suitability of the program to satisfy the occupational physician competency needs.