IFHRO: The Newsletter of the International Federation of Health Records Organizations

To adapt to the reform and development of the national secondary medical education and to meet the needs of current modern hospitals for medical record managers, a medical record management (MRM) specialty has been established in Taian Health School since 1996. Enrolment includes junior middle school graduates from all over Shandong Province. The program consists of a four-year term of study. As its courses were offered, we emphasized that the secondary medical education should be geared to 21st century, which has been regarded as a general training objective. The present paper discusses the offering of courses of MRM specialty based on our practice and understanding. Its purpose is to strengthen the cooperation with each of the fraternal schools and specialists and to make contributions to the Chinese medical record education undertaking. Offering the courses should be based on a high starting point. Medical Record Management is a newly emerging and frontier science developing in the past ten years. Modern clinical and basic medical research cannot work without medical record management. In addition, the quality of hospital administration and medical care cannot improve without it and even throughout the medical undertakings would be closely linked to it. But the present situation in our country, especially the professional skills of medical record managers, falls behind the development of medical undertakings, which most of medical record managers in our country and our province have not been trained before working in the environment. We think it is not enough to depend only on their systematic professional training for changing the situation. We must seek a permanent solution to the problem. We ought to see clearly a necessity of developing a regular education of medical record management in China. According to domestic conditions we should have a clear idea of how to move forward in a way so our medical record education is based on training qualified personnel, of leaping over the 20th century and into the 21st century in order to catch up with the advanced nations in the area of education. Thus, we suggest that the courses offered should be based on a high standard. We think that includes two aspects of the teachers' teaching and the students' studying. As the teachers' teaching, a high starting point means that the teachers must have the richest knowledge for the teaching courses and even should be specialists. Therefore, when selecting and training the teachers for the specialty, we laid stress on to select superiors. In the aspect of students as another main body of teaching and studying, the point means that the students ought to master modern professional theories and techniques by studying the concerned courses. Of the courses, we emphasized especially those about information techniques such as computer knowledge. English as a studying tool also was emphasized. As well as gaining basic computer skills, students could also develop programs for hospital administration.