[Use of the Total Quality strategy in the educational process of the occupational medicine specialist].

The formative process of the Occupational physician: a Total Quality approach. There is a growing interest in applying the concepts of Total Quality Management to the fields of health care and medical education. This paper analyses the field of occupational medicine education to explore the relationships of teaching and delivering a product or a service. Issues such as defining teaching customers, addressing customer's needs, teaching processes, assessing and improving quality teaching are described. The occupational physician is requested to act according to particular competencies. This implies the need to meet specific requirements. To assure the achievement of these goals, the implementation of a teaching process must include: (i) targeting the learning objectives (knowledge, skills and attitudes the specialist should have), (ii) planning the evaluation system (ability of the course to assure the objective achievement), (iii) evaluating the curriculum (compliance of the acquired competencies to the needs).