Meet the NURED Project Lead Partner: Finland!

Dear readers,

As promised, this week it’s time to get familiar with the NURED Project lead partner Finland & Arcada University of Applied Sciences.

Finland is often presented as the land of a thousand lakes and summer villas. The land of dark winters, and a sun that never sets in the summer. The land of Mika Häkkinen, Jean Sibelius, Moomin trolls and Marimekko.

There are 5.5 million of us Finns, and we have two official languages: Finnish and Swedish – though Sámi spoken by the indigenous Sámi people in Northern Lapland is often considered the third, official language. Our current president since 2012 is Mr Sauli Niinistö, and we’ve been a member of the European Union (which funds this project) since 1995.

To give you some numbers closer related to this project: out of us 5.5 million, 73 278 people received regular home care nursing in November 2015. 66% of them were women, as women have a 5 year higher life-expectancy than men in Finland. The number of home care nursing clients has had a trend of increasing by 0.5-1%/year for the past few years in Finland – this means that the demand for well-educated staff also increases yearly, and this is where we hope our project will be useful.

Our team in Finland works at Arcada University of Applied Sciences. Arcada offers bachelor and master degree studies in Swedish and English in our beautiful capital city of Helsinki, and currently has 2443 students. Many of those 2443 students are studying nursing, so while working for the greater good with this project we are also working on improving the quality of our education and the future of our very own nursing students.

And the team? Take a look at the little picture show above, and you’ll find us!

From right: Jukka Surakka (Head of Research at Arcada), Anu Grönlund (Degree program director of Public Health Nursing at Arcada + PhD-student at our partner school in Sweden; Mälardalen University), Pamela Gray (Degree program director of Nursing (ENG) at Arcada), and last but not least me, Maria Grotell (Project assistant and Arcada Alumni; Public Health Nurse and Nurse since 2013) and our little “project mascot” Molly – my 1-year-old daughter. You will get to know all of us a little better via this blog in due time.

Next time we will give you an update on the actual project: How will it actually be carried out? How far along are we now? Thank You for reading, stay tuned!