For the time being, the Sigmund Freud Private University (SFU) will not be given a postponement for the end of its medical master’s degree. The Federal Administrative Court dismissed a corresponding complaint by the university. The university’s accreditation for the course was revoked in autumn due to quality defects.
At the same time it was decided that an appeal should not have a suspensive effect – this has now been confirmed by the court.
However, no decision has yet been made on the legal remedy once morest the revocation of the accreditation itself. However, the knowledge that has now been gained means that the university is not allowed to apply for the relevant course of study or even accept students until a decision has been made on the main issue. The SFU now wants to fight this with an extraordinary appeal to the Administrative Court, according to a spokesman for the university in the online “Standard”.
The reason for the revocation of the approval was an expert opinion commissioned by the Agency for Quality Assurance and Accreditation Austria (AQ Austria), which identified numerous shortcomings at the SFU. While these were assessed as being remediable in other areas, it was assumed in the medical sector that they might “not be remedied” within the statutory period of two years. The reason is “major deviations from national and international standards” in terms of personnel and research infrastructure. There were also “considerable concerns” regarding the study plans: due to the lack of a separate university clinic, clinical teaching is too late and too little, and because of the large number of cooperating clinics, a uniform training standard is “hardly achievable”.
The current finding of the Federal Administrative Court should not make the SFU too optimistic. In the event of deficiencies in the practice of medicine, “in any case, serious disadvantages for the public good (health interests) must be feared and there is therefore imminent danger, even if the deficiencies or disorders have not yet posed an immediate threat to health and life of patients. Accordingly, the Federal Administrative Court does not consider it disproportionate if an increase in the number of medical students and prospective physicians who complete a degree with poor quality is prevented in the interest of the students concerned and the (domestic) health system.”
In addition, the SFU collects 12,500 euros per semester in tuition fees for the (six-semester) human medicine master’s degree. “Should students continue to be admitted to the Master’s degree in ‘Human Medicine’ at this private university, these students must also fear a considerable financial disadvantage if this Master’s degree were revoked.” It is also not certain that all achievements made up to that point will be recognized at other universities.
In another point, the court also notes a circumstance that should also lead to problems for the university in the main proceedings. From the data reported by the SFU, AQ Austria “correctly deduced that the private university accepted significantly more students in the courses in question at the beginning of the course than was stated in the ex-ante program accreditation.” This is “essential insofar as no corresponding adaptation of the resources (among other things) in the area of personnel was made in accordance with the underlying accreditation requirements, which is why in the academic year 2021/2022 the student-teacher ratio in the Bachelor’s degree in ‘Human Medicine’ was 1:239.6 and in the Master’s degree ‘ Human Medicine’ 1:78.4.”
In addition, the university itself wrote in its complaint that “(only now) current negotiations (…) are being conducted with other clinics, so that ‘the affected chief physicians or department heads of the clinics will act as full-time members’ of the complainant in the future”. For the court, for these reasons alone, “there are still significant deficiencies in the ‘human medicine’ courses of study at this private university”.
