I Jornadas RSEF / IFIMED de Física Médica

Eight years experience of the Master on Medical Physics at UNED

No programado

Parque Científico. Salon de Actos Edificio de Cabecera (IFIC-Valencia)

Descripción

The higher education structure changed all around Europe with the upcoming of the European Space for Higher Education (ESHE) after the Bologna treaty. This educational space allows, among others, new postgraduate studies aimed at a specialized life-long learning in an ever-changing labor world. These life-long students will have available the exploration of new fields thanks to the new Bologna modular and adaptable vision of higher education. Although this has not been an easy task, especially in medical studies like Medical Physics (MP), current technology allows any institution to offer these specialized studies. Here we will present our positive experience during 8 years in the Master on Medical Physics, offered by the UNED. There exists an idea about MP which refers exclusively to radiological physics and all topics related to it. However its current field of application is wider as “an applied branch of physics concerned with the application of the concepts and methods of physics to the diagnosis and treatment of human disease”, defined by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. After this definition of MP, we may ask: Is it possible to study Medical Physics at UNED? This postgraduate course to be taken by people who are most of them part-time students. These experienced users demand the highest level of time and space flexibility, but without loss of quality. Any MP Master also needs a hospital support. Although UNED has no tradition on medical studies, some of its staff has prior experience with a former Master on Biomedical Engineering, offered in collaboration with the Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón (HGUGM) in Madrid. Furthermore, the Medical Physics research group of the UNED collaborates with the Research Department of HGUGM and other research groups from the University Carlos III (Leganés). We have taken advantage of these experience and cooperation to provide this MP Master together using hospital and other facilities supplied by these institutions. The MP Master at UNED was consciously designed to cope with many possible former qualifications. We believe this is the reason why it has attracted the interest of so many students with different backgrounds. During the first two semesters they take the Curricular Adaptation Course depending on their needs; for a given student, some of these subjects are mandatory and others are only orientative. The MP Master focuses on the main branches of Medical Physics, scientific and medical computing, biomedical engineering, and medical imaging and also provides elementary teaching in cell biochemistry, physiology, and pathology to allow basic understanding of body systems, their normal function and disease. In order to keep a good ratio of students per teacher, the maximum number of students simultaneously taking the Master is maintained below 100. The number of students graduated from the Master in these 8 years has been 16, showing the difficulty of these studies at a distance. However the satisfaction index expressed by these graduates is high, of 85.24% on average (moving from 77.58% to 94.85%). Both the Master design, the quality of the facilities available to students, and their overall satisfaction have been assessed and verified by ANECA (the Spanish quality assurance agency for higher education) on 2015.