Project From Cure To Care: Digital Education and Spiritual Assistance in Hospital Healthcare

The project ‘From cure to care – digital education and spiritual assistance in hospital healthcare’ is financed by the extraordinary call KA226, Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education – Digital Education Readiness, from Erasmus+ programme, which aims to equip education and training systems to face the challenges presented by the recent sudden shift to online and distance learning.

The project starts in May 2021, and intends to innovate the nurses’ curriculum while giving a specific training to nurse students to improve the patient care. The impact of the health crisis provoked by Covid-19 is therefore mitigated with the project execution.

More specifically, the project purpose is developing the nurse’s 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:

• 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;
• Identification, assessment and management of patients’ religious and spiritual requests in the multicultural contemporary society.

During the project, the partner consortium carries out four case-study analyses aimed at exploring nurses’ competencies and skills in the digital field and in religious-spiritual assistance in healthcare. This leads 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 is 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 project budget ascends to 200,000 euro approximately. Coordinated by the University of Turin, it also counts with the participation of four European universities. UNIR contributes with its expertise and knowledge in the course design and platform creation, needed to implement the online course, as well as collaborating in the other work packages.

Partners: Universita de Turín (Italy), University Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński (Poland), Universidad de Extremadura (Spain), Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR), The Provost, Fellows, University College of Dublin (Ireland).

Reference: 2020-1-IT02-KA226-HE-095300

Duration: 2021-2023

Funding type: European public