Assuring Quality Health Care Traineeships for Medical and Professionals Allied to Medicine through embedding and exploiting tools across Higher Education (HEALINT4ALL) Erasmus Project

Project Title

Assuring Quality Health Care Traineeships for Medical and Professionals Allied to Medicine through embedding and exploiting tools across Higher Education (HEALINT4ALL)

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 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Quality Assurance

Project Summary

CONTEXT
To provide Medical and PAMS students with the best clinical learning environments, quality processes must be in place and these require innovation to assure audit material resources that are fit for purpose, can work well within the situation and provide the correct teaching and learning to train auditors. This is essential to facilitate consistency and assure confidence for all stakeholders in the audit process and its outcomes. Quality assured clinical learning, including evidence shared across boundaries, will support a globally prepared Medical and PAMS international workforce able to transfer skills and practice and offer best interventions to enhance patient treatment. Shared evidence is also essential within the EU, due to benefits of free movement, of health professionals across borders (EC/36/2005 amendment EU/55/2013) and cross border healthcare, which includes movement of patients to receive treatment (2011/24/EU). Both directives include a requirements to ensure parity of competence and standards of professional proficiency, and their very presence points to the necessity of cultural appreciation and understanding of the needs of patients across borders. HEALINT4ALL provides Medical Education and Professionals Allied to Medicine an audit system to facilitate quality assurance of EU clinical learning environments. Students will be confident that they can obtain an increased number and variety of safe optimised learning placements through extensive partnerships developed, thus fostering inclusivity. Opportunity to increase high quality placements internationally through the wider application of the system to the International Standards Organisation, International Workshop Agreement will be explored, as quality assurance will be benchmarked to this standard. Development of the skills and knowledge of auditors and auditor trainees to undertake audit is also critical and will be enhanced using new and innovative digital interactive resources. An existing audit tool currently available as a pdf online version will be newly developed into a digital interactive resource for use electronically by auditors in the field. This project contributes to global citizenship as well as health and wellbeing supported by professionals in promoting high standards and best practice, which will be exported and disseminated widely across multiple professions and with capacity to be utilised across the world.

OBJECTIVES
1. To map and innovatively adapt newly established Audit Protocol and Support tools to suit the Higher Education needs for wider application to medicine and professionals allied to medicine.
2. To develop a digital interactive interactive audit tool, which can be used in situ via ipads etc, supported by access to a central database, which can be easily managed by a provider and suit multi-professions.
3. To develop a virtual interactive learning and teaching resource for auditor preparation and update, which can be cascaded and incorporated into self directed and blended learning.
4. To add further languages of the European Union and incorporate partners integration of the tools in all languages to facilitate wide use across multi-professions.
5. To execute an ongoing programme of intensive dissemination and impact evaluation in order to establish the HEALINT Tools and subsequent IWA as the gold standard audit tool for the assessment of clinical placements supporting international mobility by all healthcare.

HEALINT4ALL brings professionals and students from Medicine and PAMS education together with experts in quality assurance standards for healthcare education; health education researchers and technologists from five countries and six sites of the project. A strengths based, user centred, Appreciative Inquiry (AI) approach (Cooperider and Whitney et al 2005) is adopted for implementation of HEALINT4ALL. AI permits development of outputs with consistency and follows a change management ethos enabling effective evaluation of activity and impact. This supports activity including user centred data collection from relevant stakeholders, and use of exploratory results for design and delivery.

RESULTS
Two new audit protocols for audit of hospitals or clinics in the five languages of the project to receive students in Medicine and PAMS education.
A mapping report identifying clinical learning environment requirements of Medical education and PAMS education.
A portable digital interactive tool for audit of pan-European and National placements in practice.
Virtual interactive teaching package for auditors training enabling learning through self and blended learning approaches
Evaluation report of feasibility and acceptability of the system in practice and evaluation of system integrity when compared to other quality standards.
Report on recommendations and best practice for using the audit system for quality assurance of Medicine and PAMS learning environments.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 369535 Eur

Project Coordinator

THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM & Country: UK

Project Partners

• SATAKUNNAN AMMATTIKORKEAKOULU OY
• PANSTWOWA WYZSZA SZKOLA ZAWODOWA W TARNOWIE
• MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY HIGHER EDUCATION CORPORATION
• UNIVERSIDAD DE ALICANTE
• KNOWLEDGE INNOVATION CENTRE (MALTA) LTD
• ARISTOTELIO PANEPISTIMIO THESSALONIKIS