Accreditation of biomedical engineering programs in Europe - challenge and opportunity

Today, more than 100 universities and polytechnic schools in Europe offer educational programs in biomedical engineering at all academic levels, but without any international coordination of contents and required qualifications. Transnational mobility for education, training and employment is an essential objective of the European Union. Such mobility is difficult to achieve because of different national practices in education, training and employment and in recognition of outcomes and accreditation. Accreditation plays an important role in ensuring transnational mobility and employability, and offers the additional advantages of confidence for the employer that the employee has the necessary education, training and responsible experience, and confidence for the user of the service, e.g. patients, that those providing the service are effective and competent. In order to enhance the advantages of accreditation to biomedical engineers, it is essential that structures are set up enabling the comparability, compatibility and mutual recognition of BME degrees. National quality assessment and accreditation schemes have to be established where they do not yet exist, and they have to be harmonized, i.e. they need to satisfy those criteria which the European BME community will have to establish on a transnational basis and mutually agree upon. Though accreditation in BME is extremely important and directly related to the issues of health care quality, defining internationally accepted criteria, minimum requirements and competencies is a rather challenging task. Difficulties result from the vast diversity of partially incompatible educational systems, but also from the exceptionality of the young, highly dynamic discipline of biomedical engineering which offers a whole range of different qualifications and directions, related to various engineering specialty matters and which, as a part of the so-called life sciences, is reaching far into neighboring sciences such as medicine, biology and biochemistry. Adding to the problem are the many established academic programs within the classical engineering disciplines offering specialization in BME up to different levels of qualification or competency.