EDITORIAL

The XVIII^th Meeting of the Spanish Society for Medical Education

Jorge Palés

President of SEDEM

From 24 to 26 October 2007, the Eighteenth Congress of the Spanish Society for Medical Education (SEDEM) will be held in the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, organized by the Faculty of Medicine of the University of La Laguna and the Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria with the support of public autonomic and local institutions as well as private institutions, and with the enhancement of group of very active teachers who try to create the Canary Association for Medical Education.

For the occasion, we have chosen as its main theme, the topic: The change in Education for the Professional Improvement. Actually, the process of adaptation to the Bologna Declaration has been initiated with the development of the new medical and health sciences curricula and the reform of the specialized medical education. In this context, it is necessary to promote the continuity of the different phases of medical education, traditionally isolated. For these reasons, the scientific committee has decided to organize a round table with the participation of different stakeholders as the Educative Government Bodies, the Deans of the Spanish Medical Schools, the Spanish National Council of Specialities in Health Sciences, the students and the residents, that will express their opinion about the mechanisms that can permit to improve the relationships between the different steps of medical education, usually poor connected.

Moreover, an important debate has been aroused in our country on the need to increase the number of new students in medical schools or to create new medical schools, in response to the needs of our health system. SEDEM wants to contribute to this debate and it has decided to organize a second round table in which different stakeholders as the Health Government Bodies, Medical Schools, professional associations, the public and private employers and the postgraduate tutors can express their opinions. We hope that from these discussions, we can obtain interesting conclusions that permit us to move in the right direction.

Moreover, our meeting will celebrate two special sessions. The first one will be dedicated to the memory of Prof. Miriam Friedman, and devoted to the topic of the use of simulations in medical education. This session will be in charge of two experts in this field, Prof. Amitai Ziv, from the Sheva Simulation Center in Israel and former collaborator of Miriam Friedman and Prof. Guillermo Vázquez from the Fundación Iavante, Granada, Spain. We hope that from this session, interesting recommendations could arouse on the rational use of the simulations in medical education, that constitute, according to Amitai Ziv an ethical imperative to assure the patients security that can enter in conflict with the future professionals learning in any moment of the educative process.

The second one will be devoted to the presentation in Spain of the Medical Education Information and Resource Bank (MERIB), a project coordinated by AMEE in the context the European Network MEDINE, in which SEDEM participates. In this session, the project will be presented by its leader, Prof M. Patricio. The goal of this project is made available to all interested people complete information about different topics in medical education, using the Internet.

SEDEM, according to its goals, hopes to be a forum where all who works and research in the field of medical education can present and discuss about educative innovations. For this reason, we will reserve enough time to the presentation of both oral and poster communications by delegates, whose number has increased in the last editions of our meeting. We want to encourage you to contribute to the meeting with your communications. The Congress will be completed by symposia on different topics in Medical Education and it will be preceded by a day-long pre-congress sessions of workshops, a meeting of tutors of Canary Islands and as usual, by the conference of Deans of Spanish medical schools, who always offers its support to our meeting.

Finally, during the inaugural session, the President of AMEE, Professor M. Patricio, will present a lecture about the state of the art of the Bologna process, and following the tradition initiated in the last meeting, the II Prize Antonio Gallego for Professional Excellence in Medical Education will be presented.

I want to finish this editorial, thanking Educación Médica Internacional once more for the opportunity it provides to present our Eighteen Meeting and to cover its contents in the next issue. The journal has certainly played a key role in the success of recent SEDEM meetings.

We hope the congress topics are considered interesting and useful for your work as medical educators and the warm welcome of the community of the Canary Islands will persuade you to decide to share your time and experience together with us.