Quality Assurance
The Faculty of Health Sciences is committed to continuous improvement in the quality of the programs it offers. This is affected through a number of strategies including:
- Regular external review of courses offered within the Faculty;
- Review every year of the units offered within the Faculty;
- Review of the quality of teaching undertaken by staff within the Faculty. This review is taken into account in both probation and promotion decisions.
The review processes are very important for the Faculty, and students are encouraged to complete the relevant forms accurately as these form the basis for decisions about how units and courses will be offered in future years.
Quality assurance of units
The quality assurance of units scheme involves all units within the Faculty being evaluated over a two-year period using standard questionnaires. There are three main questionnaires used within the Faculty: one for general units, one for clinical units and one for on-line units. The forms are distributed towards the end of the semester and collected by a person other than the lecturer in charge of the subject. The forms are scanned by the Faculty Office and the raw data, including any qualitative feedback, is provided to the unit coordinator. The unit coordinator writes a report on the results of the student feedback, and this is provided to the degree coordinator and the Head of School for their input before it is provided to the Dean. All 1st year units are involved in the quality assurance of units scheme every year, and later year units are generally reviewed every second year, except where a problem has been identified with a unit in the previous year.
There is additional reporting required of units which have received poor feedback. In this regard poor feedback is defined as where:
- The ‘Overall Satisfaction’ mean is less than 3;
- There are more than 20% of respondents dissatisfied on the ‘Overall Satisfaction’ question; or
- There are 3 or more questions with a mean less than 3.
Overall the feedback across the Faculty from the quality assurance of units scheme is good.