The NURED Roadtrip – Discussions about developing nursing curriculas across the Baltic Region

Team NURED is soon ready for a well-deserved summer break, but before this we would like to share some of the things that we have been up to during this spring!

As Lead Partner representative I, Anu Grönlund, went on a road trip visiting all partners and participated in all focus groups discussions that we had planned to conduct during the spring. The aim of the focus group discussions was to test the first draft of the freshly aligned curricula for nursing students that we have been working on for a while now. We invited students, teachers and people from the home care field in all participating countries to participate in the groups where we discussed the relevance of the content, as well as what the strengths and weaknesses were. The idea of a roadtrip was to, somehow, systemize all discussions – even though we had worked together in the team with the interview guide we still felt that it was a quality measurement for one person to participate and partially moderate all groups.

– In January 2019 we started on home ground, and conducted the first of four focus group discussions in Helsinki at Arcada UAS. We had two teachers present, and two participants joined via Skype. The student who wasn´t able to be present luckily sent her feedback and thoughts to us in writing.
– In February 2019, it was time for a focus group at Riga Stradins University. We had participants from care units, and both teachers and students from Riga Stradins University, which was great! In Riga, 6 people participated in the actual discussion, but all members of NURED Team Riga were present and pitching in with the technicalities during the discussion. Afterwards, Svetlana was kind and showed a bit of Riga to me. We went up to the tower of Latvian Academy of Sciences. It was a bit windy, but what a fantastic view!
– In March 2019 it was time for me to visit Tallinn Health Care College, were we had three representatives from the college. Unfortunately, some representatives from the home care unit could not attend due to sickness, but we had a fruitful discussion anyway!
– A couple of days later it was time for the last focus group discussion, which took place at Mälardalen University in Sweden. In that discussion both teachers and representatives from the working life participated, all in all 7 people.

In all focus groups, the participants agreed that we had really succeeded in creating a meaningful and relevant curricula consisting of 16 ECTS. This was, of course, delightful news to all of us, since we had been working quite hard on trying to really focus on the most relevant aspects of the work in home care and what kind of competences future home care staff will need! Yet, participants said that we have a lot of content in the curricula and they were a bit worried about how we can manage all the content. We discussed this a lot afterwards in the team, and did some changes regarding learning outcomes based on the feedback.  Another aspect that made us really happy was that the participants could see a clear progression from EQF level 5 to 6. We have put a lot of effort into describing the learning outcomes on both levels, since we are creating curriculas for students on both levels.

The entire NURED team met in April in Tallinn to discuss and commonly analyze the results of all focus groups according a SWOT-matrix. After two intensive days, we were able to update the aligned curricula based on the discussions from all focus group discussions. This has been a really interesting way of working, and I consider it a privilege to have been able to travel and participate in all discussions with my skilled colleagues in our beautiful countries. This roadtrip taught me that despite the change of location the challenges are the same in all NURED partner countries – such as the vast and constantly growing amount of patients within home care services, while the home care professionals battle scarce resources.

We have already begun the preparations for our upcoming final seminar, so please, save the date November 14th 2019! The seminar will take place at Arcada UAS in Helsinki, but it will be video streamed live so you can also participate online from anywhere around the world. More information will be revealed soon!
Meanwhile, on behalf of the whole NURED team, I wish you a wonderful and relaxing summertime!

Anu Grönlund
Lead Partner Team Member, NURED
Programme Manager of Public Health Nursing education, Arcada UAS
PhD-student at Mälardalen University