Personal safety of medical personnel in difficult professional situations Erasmus Project

Project Title

Personal safety of medical personnel in difficult professional situations

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Quality and Relevance of Higher Education in Partner Countries; Open and distance learning

Project Summary

The chief goal of the “SAFEMEDIC” project was to improve the workplace safety of healthcare professionals by increasing their skills and competences in dealing with difficult situations. To achieve this, the project consortium designed and developed a complex multi-stakeholder, inter-disciplinary course for healthcare students, predominantly focused on paramedics and nurses. The didactic materials and project’s intellectual outputs may also be helpful for other health workers such as physicians and physiotherapists.

The International Labor Organization has recognized the medical profession as the second most vulnerable occupational group in the workplace.

Our needs analysis proved that violence against healthcare professionals is a serious problem across Europe. Below are some of our findings:

Out of the persons who had had prior experience with patients only 5,9% said that they had never been verbally assaulted by patients and 62,5% were victims of physical assault by patients at least once.

83,4% of respondents claimed that healthcare professionals are more or much more likely to be victim of verbal and physical assault during work then other professions.

47,1% have never taken part in a course on how to deal with threatening situations in the workplace, while only 19,6% of them took part in a course catered for the medical professions at work or at university.

Only 7,8% of respondents answered that healthcare professionals in their countries receive rather enough training in dealing with threatening situations in the workplace. 54,9% answered “definitely not” and 37,3% answered “rather not”.

To the question “Do you feel that a practical course to support health care professionals deal with aggressive patients would increase the overall safety of health care professionals?” 43,1% answered “definitely yes” and 47,1% answered “rather yes”.

This project combined the knowledge and experience of 6 international partners to create a comprehensive interactive online course for healthcare professionals on how to act in difficult situations at the workplace.

The project was addressed mainly to students of medical sciences. All partner universities integrated the course in their regular teaching programme. We suggest other European universities to do the same. The course is around 80 hours of learning time and we suggest 4 ECTS points for anyone who finishes all 4 modules. The course will also be of great use to persons already working in healthcare.

The course was created specifically so that most of it can be taught via blended learning. The whole course is available online on Moodle and the practical part will be accessible in the form of learning materials, allowing an instructor to conduct practical training. After logging onto the website https://moodle.safemedic.eu you will find yourself in the “cockpit” of five SAFEMEDIC courses, where you choose the language version of the course. The following versions are available:
English, Czech, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovenian.

The course materials can be used sequentially or selectively, depending on your needs. The learning content of the course is organized into the following modules:

· Introductory section
· Module 1-1: Violence and aggression – anthropological perspective
· Module 1-2: Violence and aggression – psychological perspective
· Module 2-1: Violence and aggressive behaviour – legal perspective
· Module 2-2: Risk management
· Module 3: Negotiations
· Module 4: Techniques of de-escalating aggression in patients in a hospital setting

To access the course, you need to create your account, which is done automatically and the only information you are expected to provide is your name and e-mail address. In this way you will acquire the “Student” status, which will give you access to all the materials needed by a learner. To use all the resources of the course you need the “Non-editing teacher” status – if you need it, please contact
the administrator of the course.

Every educational institution wishing to use the course as its own should contact the administrator, download the full package of the course free of charge and place it on its moodle platform (which will allow making any changes and/or amendments, enlisting students and observing their operations on the platform, etc.). Since almost all the videos are streamed, the whole course is compressed to only ca. 300 MB.

A printed handbook was also created with instructions on how to access and use the online materials, how to prepare and conduct practical classes, and with many additional resources. The leader of the project – Lipinski University in Kielce, Poland (Wyższa Szkoła Ekonomii, Prawa i Nauk Medycznych im.prof. Edwarda Lipińskiego, www.wseip.edu.pl) is ready to provide teachers and students with the printed version of “The Guide”. The book, as many other educational materials, are also available for download from the course platform.

Project Website

https://moodle.safemedic.eu/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 275450,85 Eur

Project Coordinator

Wyzsza Szkola Ekonomii, Prawa i Nauk Medycznych im. prof. Edwarda Lipinskiego w Kielcach & Country: PL

Project Partners

• KAUNO KOLEGIJA
• Vysoka skola zdravotnicka, o.p.s.
• ALMA MATER EUROPAEA-EVROPSKI CENTER, MARIBOR
• International Network for Health Workforce Education
• Munster Technological University