INDICATORS IN A QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR HIGHER EDUCATION OF ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY

Due to the exigency within the framework of the European Higher Education System (EHES) about the necessity of the implementation of policies and quality systems, the Spanish Government is actuality managing the quality in the university formation through the “Agencia Nacional de Evaluación de la Calidad y Acreditación” (ANECA).
As a result, in the Analytical Chemistry Department of the Faculty of Pharmacy at Universidad Complutense of Madrid (UCM) has been implanted a Quality Management System for the management of theoretical and practical teaching in our Department, according to "International Organization for Standardization" IOS 9001:2000 and has been obtained the corresponding certificate accredited by the Spanish Association for Standardisation and Certification AENOR (ER-1045/2007).
For the continuous quality of the process involved in our teaching, different quality indicators have been considered, that allow the control of these processes, to know weaknesses and strengths of our teaching. Its evaluation leads us to make the corrections and actions of improvement necessary. Indicators also allow us to know if the quality objectives that we set out throughout each academic course have been completely fulfilled.
Each indicator has assigned a person responsible, who studies periodically its evolution in the implied process and analyzes the results. Subsequently, the quality committee makes the opportune decisions, proposing preventive, corrections or improvement actions, if thus it is necessary.
For the establishment of the different indicators, it is considered that a good indicator should put in evidence the evolution of the parameter that represents, to give fair information, to be reliable and to be easy to define and to use.
In the present work the management method of operatives, support and teaching indicators used in our quality management system has been studied. A registration system has been developed to provide for each indicator, the person in charge, the measurement frequency, the acceptation criteria and the obtained results.
An evolution and efficiency study of these indicators has been realized for achieving our objectives.