NURED Finland goes abroad – Simulation pedagogy exchange in Riga!

Dear NURED friends,

A lot has been happening in the project recently! All project partners have been working together in workshops in Helsinki at Arcada UAS, where we tried to compile all of our results from the survey that we all have sent out to home care staff in our countries. It was interesting to work like this – together, discussing results and the questions that rose among use regarding the results!

More recently, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit NURED partner school Riga Stradins University in the middle of June. In our project, as in all Interreg Central Baltic projects, it has been considered important that we share planned course content and expertise in general with each other. Since I am a simulation instructor and have been working with that branch of pedagogy for several years now, I was invited to Riga to come and talk about simulation with their nursing teachers. We had two intensive days where we discussed different types of simulations, as well as their benefits and challenges. We discussed about using simulations as an assessment tool, and how one can design different scenarios for simulations and which factors must be considered. My colleagues in Riga seemed quite interested, and many had some experience in this way of teaching and learning. There were similarities, but also differences in the way we use this approach.

For me, as a teacher, this was a humbling experience. It is not every day that one is tutoring peers! After these two intense workshop-like days, I also had the opportunity to be a tourist in the beautiful city of Riga. I highly recommend you pay a visit to this wonderful city, if you haven´t already! The old town in like a walk-in museum, and the buildings are very well kept.

I wish you all a wonderful summer and lots of sunshine!

With warm regards,

Anu Grönlund

Public Health Nurse (MHc), Degree programme Director for Public Health Nursing at Arcada UAS (Helsinki, Finland), PhD student at Mälardalen University (Eskilstuna, Sweden)