TEACHING IN A QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION: STUDIES OF NON-COMPLIANCE

Due to the requirement under the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) to have policies and quality systems formally established and publicly available, the Spanish State is managing quality in university education through the National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA). In the Departmental Section of Analytical Chemistry of the Faculty of Pharmacy of the Complutense University of Madrid (U.C.M.) aware of the necessity of improving the quality of the imparted teachings and with the aim of completing these requirements of the EHEA, has been developed a Quality Management System (QMS) according to standard UNE-EN-ISO 9001. Since its creation, the QMS has been implemented and continually improved with different activities. In the year 2007, the Departmental Section has obtained the corresponding certificate AENOR (ER-1045/2007).

An innovative activity in the implementing QMS process has been the systematic to manage the non-compliance (NC) in the teaching field. All department staff can open a NC by direct observation. Also, a NC can be captured throught the student satisfaction studies, students comments, suggestions and complaints, data and indicators analysis, or both internal and external audits. A computer program for the management of the NC using Microsoft Excel, to facilitate their opening and monitoring, has been proposed.

In this work, a study of the NC detected in the past academic year 2009/10 has been developed. A total of 12 NC were opened in this period, 33% came from direct observation, 59% of internal audit and external audit 8%. Most were corrective actions (84%) and only 16% were issued as preventive actions. At least half of the NC were clustered in clauses 4.2 (documentation requirements) and 6.2, 6.3 (material and human resources management) of the IOS 9001 and were due to the registration of different activities developed in the department and to the limited backup data of QMS and limited training respectively. The others NC were linked to the staff motivation in the QMS, to the product realization, in particular to planning and to the measurement, analysis and improvement, particularly to the measurement of quality indicators. 87% of the NC registered during the academic year 2009/10 were resolved effectively and were the basis for setting improvement goals of this course.

The proposed program to manage the non-compliance can quickly view the NC remain to be completed and allows filtering the NC subdivided according to their origins, opening year, action type, responsible, that facilitates the tracking of them. The computer model allows speed up the resolution of these deviations and easily monitors the NC unfinished. Because of its ease of use, a motivation of the department staffs to be interested in the QMS is observed, with the consequent improvement of teaching activity developed in the department section.