New European Project to address the social challenges faced by students of healthcare-related degrees who are working on their final year dissertation

The TIC Salut Social Foundation is one of the twenty partners of EHECADI, a new European project for the creation of a digital, international and collaborative model to address the social challenges faced by students of healthcare-related degrees who are working on their final year dissertation in the disciplines of Nursing, Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, and Nutrition and Dietetics. The project will have a duration of 3 years, is headed by the University of Vic and has received a funding of 370,000 euros from the European Erasmus + programme.

The project will set up a virtual community so that students and all interested parties can share knowledge, detect the needs of society in the field of healthcare and focus their final year dissertations around these issues. In addition, the universities participating in the project will co-design, pilot and evaluate with end-users a course to train university students in digital and transversal competencies. The course contents will be oriented towards issues such as lifelong ethics, ecology, decent work, democratic life and migration, among others, and these contents will be available for the duration of the course. Finally, good practice guides will be created for students, teachers and institutions.

The head researcher of the project, Ester Goutan, stressed that “the project aims to be very inclusive and to reach as many students as possible, especially those who are interested in carrying out an international final degree project but who are unable to travel internationally”. The aim is, she said, “for students to benefit from this digital platform starting from the first year of their degree” and that, “based on the results obtained, it could also prove useful for other universities and to other areas other than health”.

TIC Salut Social Foundation’s contribution to EHECADI

The TIC Salut Social Foundation will contribute to the project by identifying and defining the competencies needed to drive the digitalisation process and the digital transformation of healthcare professionals. It will also participate in the definition of the digital competencies framework and the design of the training aimed at healthcare professionals. It will lead the pilot project in Catalonia and design the assessment framework.

The other entities participating in the project are the European University of Odisse (Belgium), Turun Ammattikorkeakoulu Oy (Finland), Waterford Institute of Technology (Ireland), Cruz Vermelha Portuguesa (Portugal) and the European University Cyprus (Cyprus), together with the European Association of Providers of Services for People with Disabilities (Belgium).