Professor Emeritus, Professeur Honoraire, University of Geneva Faculty of Medicine
Professor Nu Viet Vu, PhD is Professor Emeritus at the University of Geneva, Faculty of Medicine. With a PhD in Educational Psychology and Educational Measurement, she was, from 1978 to 1994, a faculty member of the Department of Medical Education at Southern Illinois University, Springfield, Illinois, USA. Over her 16 years’ tenure there, she had engaged and contributed in reforming the school’s curriculum and students’ performance-based assessment, emphasising students’ knowledge application, clinical reasoning skills and clinical competence development. At the national level, her scholarly works have contributed to the use of standardised patients in performance-based examinations both at the institutional and national certification levels.
In 1994, she was recruited to the University of Geneva, Faculty of Medicine (UGFM) where she created and directed the Unit of Development and Research in Medical Education (UDREM), the first of its kind in Switzerland. During her 21 years’ tenure at UGFM, she has worked with her team and the faculty in redesigning and implementing its six-year undergraduate medical curriculum, introducing instructional and assessment approaches adapted to the reformed program and renewing UGFM’s curriculum governance and organisation to sustain the reforms. She founded Switzerland’s first Clinical Competency Development Program to train students in developing their clinical skills using different types of simulations including the technique of simulated/standardised patients. At the national level, she has worked with UGFM Faculty in introducing the Swiss first accreditation process for medical schools and a bilingual standardised patient and performance-based clinical exam to accompany the Swiss Federal Exam in Human Medicine. UGFM was the first medical school in Switzerland to undergo the accreditation process and was accredited in 2005. The revised Swiss Federal Exam in Human Medicine was first administered in 2011.
Professor Vu’s research, interests and experiences have brought her to work and consult with many medical schools in two areas. One is in reforming and implementing medical curriculum, students’ performance assessment and quality assurance evaluation. The other focuses on how to establish the needed curriculum governance, organisation, and change management to introduce, support and sustain the reforms. She has been consulting with medical schools in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Scotland, Lithuania, Finland, Italy, Turkey, Morocco, and Canada. Her present engagement is with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation “Medical Education Reforms” Project in Kyrgyzstan and the World Bank and Vietnam Ministry of Health “Health Professionals Education and Training for Health System Reforms” Project in Vietnam.