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Ximena Osorio Spuler was one of the international assessors for the nursing program accreditation at the Universidad Central de Quito in Ecuador. |
As part of her visit, the academic Ximena Osorio visited the premises of the nursing program, the Hospital Eugenio Espejo in Quito and the Health Center Cochapamba Sur (community center), which are both part of the nursing program of the Ecuadorian university. According to the information of Osorio, it is important for the Assessment, Accreditation and Higher Education Quality Assurance Council of Ecuador (CEAACES) to count with a selected group of international external assessors that are part of their technical groups, to add interdisciplinarity and new knowledge to the assessment process of the nursing programs offered by the institutions of higher education in Ecuador. This is why they invited professionals from abroad, such as Ximena Osorio. “I had to do previous work, where they sent me information and we had online meetings in order to review and analyze documents and the work to do during the stay in Ecuador. They established the necessity to count with external assessors and it was a very enriching experience, since I got to know the reality of education and of the nursing training programs in Ecuador. They are standardizing and regulating their training”, she specified. The criteria that are part of the assessment model for the learning atmosphere of the nursing program in Ecuador are the relevance and context, where the current status, prospective, outreach and professional profile are considered, such as the curriculum (macro and micro) with the graduation profile and the curricular project, the syllabus, etc. After visiting the clinical campus and the practice and training installations, they worked on the reports that had to be handed to the CEAACES (equivalent to the Chilean Accreditation Commission) and this way, finished an intense week of work. “Compared to Chile, it is a different reality. Their training program has a different development since it is a traditional program at the most antique university of Ecuador. Their University was built decades ago and has a very different culture than ours. When it comes to disciplinary development, we could be more developed than they are, but in other areas they are highly developed with classrooms for skills training, implementation, strict assessment criteria and very high standards for their academics and students.” “It is very good for the UFRO that an academic of this University gets invited as an international assessor. Most of them came from Argentina and Colombia. We were only five people from Chile who got invited to participate in the assessment of 25 universities that went through the process. This is why it is relevant for the Universidad de La Frontera to be present”, added Osorio. Written by: Fabián Aguirre
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