Happy New Year – an update from the Latvian NURED team!

“Laimīgu jauno gadu!” as they would say in beautiful Latvia – or Happy New Year 2018 from the entire NURED Project Team! We hope you have all enjoyed the holidays, and feel invigorated and ready for this new year of new possibilities.

In this blog post we will take a closer look at the Latvian NURED Project Partner: Rīga Stradiņš University in Latvia, Rīga (External link). Latvia, a member of the European Union, is one of the three Baltic States, situated on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea between Estonia and Lithuania. The country is also bordered by Russia and Belarus, and shares maritime borders with Sweden. Latvia’s mostly flat landscape offers a mix of beaches, rivers, lakes, marshes and forests. Sounds lovely, right?

The Latvian NURED team consists of five members who all represent different fields:
– Ivars Vanadziņš is the lead scientist of the NURED project in Latvia, the director of the Institute for Occupational Safety and Environmental Health (IOSEH), as well as the associate professor of RSU Faculty of Medicine – Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine;
– Svetlana Lakiša is the researcher and the lead of the NURED project, a researcher of the Institute for Occupational Safety and Environmental Health, as well as a tutor at RSU Faculty of Medicine – Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine;
– Kristaps Circenis is a researcher of the NURED project, head of the RSU Master’s degree study programme in Nursing, and associate professor of Faculty of Public Health and Social Welfare – department of Nursing and Midwifery;
– Artūrs Paparde is a researcher of the NURED project, an associate professor of the RSU Faculty of Medicine – Department of Human Physiology and Biochemistry;
– Laura Haberkorne is the administrative assistant of NURED project who takes care of the project documentation.

Here are some greetings from the Latvian team:

“We feel extremely lucky to work with the nurse population, to discover what is needed and how to do things better. How is NURED progressing in Latvia? We have managed to collect 334 respondents (three men were excluded, so we have only women respondents) for the survey sent out last spring! In January 2018 we will organize three seminars called “Nursing Work Environment Stress Factors, Stress Management and Time Management” in three different regions of Latvia. We are currently developing two interactive online learning tools for NURED: the “risk ruler” which includes test questions about nursing work environment risk factors, and the “risk game” with pictures from different nurses work environments for a fun way to learn risk-determination for nursing. You can have a look at the making of the “risk game” in the picture slide show at the top of this blog post, and see if you can spot the risks in the environments? We will also start to work on our upcoming publication about adapting the survey we used via Springlife, QWC (Quality, Work, Competence scale) to Latvian language.
In other words – we are working very hard, and looking forward to our next big project meeting hosted by our partners from Tallinn, Estonia (whom you had the pleasure of meeting in our previous blog post) in February!”

As you have now met the Finnish, Estonian and Latvian NURED teams only one team remains – the Swedes from Mälardalen University, who you will get to know in an upcoming blog post this winter. In future blog posts some of our researchers and steering group members will voice their thoughts about NURED (…and all things related).  For now, we will resume our work of planning our upcoming international project meeting in Estonia. Thank you for reading!