Dipartimento di Culture, Politica e Società

Descrizione del progetto

The project aims to innovate the nurses' curriculum, responding to the recent situation created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supporting socio-health systems with targeted education and professional training policies while attenuating the impact of the crisis in this particularly stricken sector is a crucial challenge facing the EU. As Ursula von der Leyen pointed out, health and digital technologies will be the major points of the European plan by 2030.

The implementation of the “From Cure to Care. Digital Education and Spiritual Assistance in Hospital Healthcare” project contributes to these European objectives, starting from nurses who, in this time of crisis, find themselves in the front line of health and social care in the most unprecedented circumstances.

More specifically, the project intends to innovate nurses' curriculum developing their skills and competences in two areas in which they do not feel adequately prepared and which are becoming more prominent as a result of the COVID-19 crisis:

1. Digital technologies in order to streamline many administrative processes, assist with onboarding and training, enhance productivity and reduce care variability as well as to learn how to deal with telemedicine;
2. Identification, assessment and management of patients’ religious and spiritual requests in the multicultural contemporary society.

During the project the partner consortium will carry out four case-study analyses aimed at exploring nurses’ competencies and skills in the digital field and in religious-spiritual assistance in healthcare during the COVID pandemic. This will lead to a working paper on the improvement of nursing curricula with respect to the inclusion of diverse religious/spiritual needs in healthcare, and how to accommodate these and other needs through digital enhancements to the health system. This will be the starting point for the design of a blended Training Programme in “Digital Competences and Spiritual Assistance in Hospital Healthcare” consisting of: an E-Learning course, face-to-face laboratory work and blended mobility activities, as well as an evaluation of the strength and areas of improvement of the proposed implementation.

The online course will be delivered as a pilot course to about 200 HE learners from the four countries represented by the consortium (Italy, Ireland, Spain and Poland). A selected group of 20 students will also have the chance to attend 40 hours of Blended Mobility activity, which will take place in Turin, IT. Participation in the online course will foster the acquisition of novel competencies and skills; in particular, it will guarantee digital literacy and it will provide the skills needed to take advantage of the digital evolution of the healthcare system.

The training programme’s main target will be students of Nursing but it will also be open to students of Psychology and Social Sciences (such as aspiring psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and social workers) because these professions too are in the front line in approaching patients’ religious and spiritual needs and, according to the most innovative models for spiritual care in hospitals, they are supposed to work in an interdisciplinary team with sanitary operators. Moreover, during the emergency, psychologists, psychological counsellors and social workers have also experienced increased work volume, intensity and stress levels while struggling to transmute their ordinary face-to-face work into smart working.

Through the course design and delivery, the HEIs taking part in the consortium will have the chance to improve their digital educational resources and the digital competences of their education and training staff. In this sense the course will also act as a launching pad to evolve their online offer, considering multilingual and multicultural aspects. Such a programme, based on the E-Learning Course, Modules and face-to-face Laboratory work, may not only be replicated by other European universities integrating it into their curricula, but also adopted by hospitals and clinics for permanent staff training.
After the project completion, the online section of the designed course in “Digital Competences and Spiritual Assistance in Hospital Healthcare” will be made available for open access (content will have a CC-BY-NC-SA license) for self-learners on an open-source educational platform.

The publication of the course has the goal of disseminating the desirability of including of multicultural religious/spiritual needs in health care, as well as the importance of digital skills which have become more prominent in the Covid-19 pandemic within this framework. Making the course freely available to the general public, with a self-learning approach, also tends in the direction of promoting easier access to life-long learning tools for a wider range of people, especially those who, due to social or personal conditions, cannot afford to invest in a full Higher Education programme.

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