Invitation to BIOMEDEA II Conference

Warsaw, Poland
April 15-17, 2005

Modern health care depends on versatile, multidisciplinary teams with biomedical engineers playing an important role, but in contrast to the traditional academic disciplines where consensus about the necessary content of higher educational programmes and the required qualifications of professionals could be established over many decades, Medical and Biological Engineering and Science (MBES), as a young, explosively growing discipline, have not yet had this opportunity. The Bologna movement has triggered an initiative from the MBES community to promote their European Higher Education Area by harmonising the educational programmes, specifying required minimum qualifications and establishing criteria for an efficient quality control of education and life-long learning.

Joachim Nagel, as the President of the IFMBE and Chairman of the EAMBES Academic Division in 2003/4 has, together with Dick Slaaf, Jan Wojcicki and many other colleagues from 31 European countries, initiated the BIOMEDEA project, which is dedicated to support this initiative through the organisation of workshops for all partners involved in MBES education, to develop and establish consensus on European guidelines for the harmonisation of high quality MBES programmes, their accreditation and for certification and continuing education of professionals working in the health care systems. Adherence to these guidelines will insure mobility in education and employment as well as the necessary safety for patients. Targets for the dissemination of results will be the European universities, political decision makers, ENQA, accreditation agencies, health care providers and students.

BIOMEDEA has been based on three workshops, the first one on BME education and training, the second on accreditation of BME programmes and the third one on certification, registration and continuing education.

The first BIOMEDEA conference, organized and chaired by Dick Slaaf, has already been held in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, on December 17–19, 2004. The meeting in Eindhoven was dedicated to education and training in Biomedical Engineering and Sciences. A summary of the results of the meeting as well as the conference material has been prepared by Dick Slaaf and is available at the conference website: (http://www.bmt.tue.nl/biomedea/). The summary will be published in the IFMBE News, available at: (http://www.ifmbe.org).

The Eindhoven conference was also a European preparation for the second Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Education summit: (http://www.whitaker.org/academic/agenda.html). The purpose of the summit is to help universities design and modify biomedical engineering programmes to meet future needs.

The next BIOMEDEA meetings will be held in Warsaw, Poland, April 15-17, 2005 [MBES Accreditation], and in Stuttgart, Germany, June 24-25, 2005 [MBES Certification, Registration and Continuing Education].

The BIOMEDEA conference in Warsaw, Poland, organized by Jan Wojcicki and the International Centre of Biocybernetics, Polish Academy of Sciences (MCB), is dedicated to the accreditation of Biomedical Engineering Programmes in Europe and to wrapping up the results of the Eindhoven meeting.

Participation: representatives of Biomedical Engineering programmes in Europe, decision makers at a national level interested in Biomedical engineering education and BME students.

With this letter, we have the pleasure to extend to your organization an invitation to send a delegate (-s) to our Conference. Attached you will find a provisional program and information on how to register for the Conference.

For additional details and information, registration and hotel reservation visit the website of the meeting (http://www.ibib.waw.pl/Biomedea). To facilitate the organization of the conference, you are requested register, if possible, before March 15. Deadline for early registration: April 1, 2005.

On behalf of the organizers,