CHEA 7th Extraordinary Meeting By Dr Y Ratana and Mr Ban Bunheng
On August 21st, 2015, Dr. Y Ratana, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Mr. Ban Bunheng, Deputy Director of the ASEAN Study Center of the University of Cambodia were assigned by Dr. Kao Kim Hourn, Founder and President of the University of Cambodia, to participate in CHEA’s 7th Extraordinary Meet-ing at its office located in the Hun Sen Library at Beung Trobaek High School. The purposes of the meeting were:
- To disseminate SPM’s speech on August 13, 2015, in which he did not agree to transfer the control of Health Education Institutions from the Ministry of Health to the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport as proposed by CHEA.
- o prepare the Welcome Ceremony for His Excellency Hun Manet, which will be held on August 28, 2015.
- The implementation in the near future of IQA on Programming Systems, Result-based planning, and M&E, HEMIS.
- Other matters (CHEA’s soccer league establishment).
- Dr. Heng Vanda, President of CHEA’s Board of Directors and President of Vanda Institute, repeated the SPM’s speech on August 13, 2015, in which SPM stressed that he did not agree to transfer the control of Health Education Institutions and other medical science training to be under the control of MoEYS because MoEYS has no experts in these specialized skills to manage and measure the quality control. The meeting also played a video clip of SPM’s speech regarding the distributed certificate degrees at PPIU. Thereafter the meeting suggested that HEIs which offer health and medical sciences should form a working group and list down all the issues of particular institutions (International Univeristy, Chenlar Uinversity, Puthisak Universi-ty, and Sihanuok Institution), and submit it to CHEA. CHEA will then write a letter to the Minister of Health to seek for a ministerial working group to work with the CHEA working group to resolve the issues. CHEA will follow the recommendations made by SPM Hun Sen to work with the Ministry of Health to resolve the on-going unsolved issues for better implementation.
- The meeting briefly discussed the Welcome Ceremony for His Excellency Hun Manet on August 28,2015, and the dinner gathering with him. The dinner reception will be at Tonle Basak II; His Excellency Ly Cheng will facilitate this reception.
- Dr. Heng Vanda raised that MoEYS is going to use two mechanisms (ACC & IQA) to assess the quality of education in HEIs, meaning there are 9 minimum standards for ACC and there are another 5 standards for IQA (Department of Higher Education, DHE). These 5 standards seem to overlap with the 9 minimum stan-dards of ACC. DHE will use the 5 standards to assess HEIs, meaning HEIs will have to complete additional paperwork. However, it was not clear about the purpose of the DHE standards or how they will implement IQA. Thus, the meeting asked the leader of CHEA to clarify this matter with MoEYS.
- Other Matters: CHEA has requested all its members who have a soccer team to submit their team-list to CHEA in order to prepare matches. This league would allow only staff and faculty members as players.
Dr. Heng Vanda reminded again and again to representatives from HEIs to report the contents and discus-sions of the meeting to the owners of HEIs and/or Rectors, so that they are well aware of CHEA matters. This is important because most rectors or owners of HEIs don’t attend the CHEA meetings, but send their representatives instead.
