January 8, 2025 held a Workshop for accreditation experts: “Roles and competencies of experts in the external evaluation of postgraduate education”.

The workshop was held in Al-Farabi KazNU, which was attended by 50 faculty of clinical departments of the University. Considered the issues of Quality Assurance of medical education, international principles and approaches to quality assessment of PGE, the process and procedures of accreditation.

Training included the updated Standards for Quality Improvement of PGE of the WFME 2023 and the new Standards for Residency Programme Accreditation of the ECAQA. We worked on the Standards in small groups. Learned to analyze the residency programme Self-evaluation Report, plan external evaluation, identify the most effective activities of the site visit, look for evidence of compliance with Standards, formulate expert questions, etc.

At the end of the workshop, all participants received Certificates. Thus, expanding the pool of ECAQA experts.

Progress Visit to ECAQA took place on 19 June 2024. ECAQA was visited by international experts, including: Patrick Van Den Bosch, Member of ENQA Board, Chief of Flemish Higher Education Council - QA, Belgium and Nuria Comet Senal, Project coordinator for internal Quality Assurance of the accreditation agency AQU Catalunya, Spain.

Following ENQA's evaluation of ECAQA in 2021 and the decision to award ECAQA full ENQA member status in 2022, an international expert progress visit was planned for 2024. The progress visit aims: to offer an enhancement-oriented and strategically driven dialogue that ordinarily might be difficult to truly integrate in the compliance-focused site visit (the Guidelines for ENQA Agency Reviews, 2021 version), discussion of issues proposed by the Accreditation Centre (Government Policy on Quality Assurance in Higher Education: Responsiveness and Responsibility of QAA; Cross-border Accreditation in Medical and Healthcare Professions Education: Regional and National Context; Quality Assurance in Postgraduate Medical Education: Challenges and Perspectives).

The progress visit took place during the day and according to the program. Members of the Accreditation Council, Expert Board, experts on accreditation, experts-students participated from ECAQA.

ECAQA staff and experts take part in a series of webinars-2024 on “Exploring WFME Standards for PGME”, which are organized within the framework of implementation of the new Standards for Quality Improvement of Postgraduate Education of the World Federation for Medical Education - WFME, developed in 2023. The first webinar was held on April 30.

The final webinar will be held in September 2024. Members of the ECAQA Accreditation Council and the Expert Board were involved in the training. The knowledge gained will allow to make changes to the Standards for Accreditation of Residency Education Programmes.

Webinar organized by ENQA and ENIC-NARICS on the topic: "QA AGENCIES & ENIC-NARICS - COOPERATION MODELS AND OPPORTUNITIES," took place on April 8, 2024, with Alibek Amandykov, Head of the International Cooperation and Public Relations Department of the Eurasian Centre for Accreditation and Quality Assurance in Education and Healthcare participating.

During the event, speakers shared their experience in accreditation, principles, and approaches to ensuring the quality of education in Ireland and Lithuania. For instance, Andrina Wafer, Head of the International Mobility and Preliminary Education Department at QQI, presented the case study "QQI - the qualifications and quality assurance body within NARIC Ireland."

Kristina Sutkute, an information and evaluation officer at SKVC, shared her experience of cooperation between an accreditation agency and ENIC-NARIC using Lithuania as an example.

Bas Wegewijs, coordinator of the NUFFIC group and international recognition policy officer, shared his experience of cooperation between NVAO-Nuffic and ENIC-NARIC, as well as the opportunities such cooperation opens up for accreditation agencies.

The webinar was moderated by Elena Cirlan, Senior Policy and Project Coordinator at ENQA, and Chiara Finocchietti, President of the ENIC-NARIC network.