Arcada + Axxell + Prakticum = True!

Welcome back to the NURED blog, we hope you’ve all enjoyed this whirlwind of a summer! (We were going to write something witty about the weather in Finland this summer, but we guess the silly weather conditions are already old news…)

The project world is always a little quiet during the summer, but we’ve actually gotten some excellent work done here in Finland before our summer holidays that we will now share with you readers.

As our goal with NURED is to improve education for future home care nurses, and you learned in one of our previous blogs that Finland’s focus area for this project is teamwork, we have begun developing a pilot course in home care nursing for this autumn with two of our local partners: upper secondary vocal institutions Prakticum (External link) and Axxell (External link). The refined version of this course will in the end become part of the new curricula that will be the end-result of this project, but before that day comes in 2019 we have a lot of work ahead of us.

Many of you may know (and many of you may not know), that the staff in home care nursing often consists a blend of different kinds of nurses, such as practical nurses (närvårdare/lähihoitaja), registered nurses (sjuskötare/sairaanhoitaja) and public health nurses (hälsovårdare/terveydenhoitaja).  As Axxell’s and Prakticum’s students graduate to become practical nurses and Arcada’s students graduate as registered nurses (or public health nurses), it is only natural to begin the process of working together and understanding each other already during the education. Because different kinds of nurses fulfill equally important yet slightly different tasks, we believe this is an excellent way to learn to respect each other’s special skills in order to create good teamwork in the future.

This pilot course will naturally incorporate e-learning together with good ol’ classroom teaching methods, as well as especially designed simulations at Arcada’s Patient Safety Simulation Center. While we have already begun planning the details, it is of course crucial to wait for the NURED project survey results (…remember the survey we’ve mentioned before? Have a look at our blogpost #3 to refresh your memory if needed!), as those results are the key to what currently epmloyed home care nurses feel needs to be improved in the education. We can’t wait to start deciphering all the information we’ve gathered from the survey, and we hope to be able to share some of the results with you readers this autumn. In the meantime, we’ll continue planning the course and will keep you updated.

In less than two weeks’ time we’ll have an international project team meeting with all NURED partner countries here at Arcada in Finland – expect to hear back from us again soon after!