Professional Nursing Education and Training Erasmus Project

Project Title

Professional Nursing Education and Training

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 vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Health and wellbeing; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning

Project Summary

Work-oriented education and training has a considerable impact on improving the performance of nurses, and detecting and compensating existing gaps in the nursing knowledge domain. The stakeholders in this process at various levels are nursing students, nurses, medical supervisors, human resource managers, employers, and educators. Employing Information Technology (IT) solutions can be expected to contribute to the continuous improvement of work-based education and training processes, and may ultimately enhance the quality of learning outcomes. Such a system should not only comprise the systematic assessment of knowledge domains in compliance with standard curricula and the provision of learning contents, but also, and perhaps more importantly, it should ensure a match with the requirements, including knowledge elements, of identified nursing tasks and associated processes.
In light of these developments, Pro-Nursing was aimed at three main objectives; i) bridging between nursing tasks and nursing knowledge to represent their interrelationship to the different target groups, ii) assessing knowledge levels of nurses and recommending appropriate learning materials to improve the detected knowledge gaps, and iii) monitoring the knowledge gaps of nurses who are working at hospitals. In order to realize these objectives, the Pro-Nursing web-based application, including its ontological back-end, was developed. The Pro-Nursing system, hence, supports nursing educators and supervisors to ensure the quality of nursing care in the clinics and hospitals in the long-run.
With regard to the original project application, the intellectual outputs of the project are labelled: (O1) Nursing Process Ontology, including five activities, (O2) Nursing Domain Ontology, including four activities, and (O3) Pro-Nursing Web-based Application including eight activities. The intellectual outputs have been monitored and realized based on proper implementation of their subset activities.
Moreover, In order to i) test the Pro-Nursing application, ii) receive the feedback of the end-users, iii) reach project stakeholders and the general public, and iv) disseminate the project’s results, the consortium organized a one-day symposium (E1) in Bonn. The Pro-Nursing symposium provided an international forum for researchers and practitioners in the field of vocational learning, technology enhanced learning, and particularly vocational education in the domain of health and nursing. The audience included representatives from seven EU-countries, namely, Austria, England, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Spain. Three speakers from three different disciplines of nursing education, VET and competence management delivered a keynote presentation. Moreover, eight selected papers and posters were presented by the authors. The presentations of the keynote speeches, presented papers, and posters are available on the Pro-Nursing homepage at www.pro-nursing.eu/web/download/show. Furthermore, the selected papers have been published in a book entitled “Professional Education and Training through Knowledge, Technology, and Innovation “, with ISBN: 978-3-936533-77-4. The online version of the book is accessible via the OPUS portal of the library of University of Siegen.
The Pro-Nursing project has thus reached the expected impact at the local, regional, national and European/international level as described below.
• The Pro-Nursing application provides the nursing taxonomy, the nursing task list and the task-knowledge matrix for supporting nursing schools and authorities at the local, regional, and national level towards bridging the gap between labor market requirements and learning contents provided in nursing curricula and study programs.
• The Pro-Nursing application is an easy to use, accessible, web-based application which promotes the use of ICT in nursing education and training for all levels of students, job applicants, and employed nurses, particularly in the German nursing sector.
• The Pro-Nursing project has provided an opportunity for HRM and job analysis staff to work on identify, analyze, and define nursing job.
• Pro-Nursing has defined, adopted and deployed the methodologies of implementing the nursing task list, the nursing process model, the nursing task-knowledge matrix, and the evaluation of the results of the project. The methodologies are provided as a response to the need of a benchmark for combining the analyses of task, knowledge domain and curricula in a unified framework for European and international nursing sectors.
To disseminate the project results and to further enlarge the network, the Pro-Nursing consortium established an associated partnership with five institutions, namely, Fivan from Spain, Concetra from England, Frenetti from the Netherlands, European Association for Practitioner Research on Improving Learning (EAPRIL) from Belgium, DEKRA Academie GmbH from Germany under HCEU project.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 289553 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITAET SIEGEN & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Netpositive Kft
• Beta Klinik GmbH
• UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM