About The Satisfaction of the Student Attending the Health area Academic Courses of the University of Bari

In the last decade, the world of academia has faced a period of strong/severe resource constraints/reduction. At the same time, there has been an increasing interest of the Ministry of Research (MIUR) in designing methods to evaluate University performance in order to rank efficient Universities and to reduce potential inefficiencies, so providing the administration authorities with measures that may be used for an optimal resources allocation. With this increasing interest in University performance, a wide academic debate has emerged about the models and measures adopted, based on several quantitative measures of inputs that, sometimes, have been borrowed from the Italian Health organizational model, much more consolidated in its experience. We cite, for all, the students evaluation in terms of standard cost within the resources allocation model introduced last year, and the “customers” satisfaction measurement, whose main goal is to provide an independent system of regular evaluation of student satisfaction and of the University teaching quality. The aim of this paper is to deal with the students opinion about the quality of teaching, as perceived as “users” while attending their academic courses in the health area. We agree with the statement that the high quality of healthcare services provided to the community depends also on the main factor, the human capital involved in supplying them. In Italy, the academic courses belonging to the health area provide the access to a limited number of students who passed a hard selection. This rule was introduced by the law n.264/1999 to harmonize the Italian University system to the European one in order to guarantee the high quality of students higher education in this field. And that quality of the education, according to the law, depended on the places in the classrooms, on the equipment and scientific laboratories for teaching; on the teaching staff and technical personnel; on the assistance and tutoring service, on the apprenticeships and places available in laboratories and classrooms equipped for practical, on the presence of technical-practical and laboratory activities. For the Government, that is the main donor for Italian Universities, the level of student satisfaction is of great importance to evaluate the quality of their courses. It is actually measured by different points of view as quality of teachers, teaching materials and logistical support. The law n.370/1999 states that Italian Universities have to systematically carry out a survey on the satisfaction of “teaching” of their students; this survey is named Opinione degli studenti . Recently, the National Agency of Evaluation (ANVUR) has been entrusted to oversee the related processes. Since 2013, the University of Bari, like the other Universities, has adopted the ANVUR guidelines.