HCEU international workshop, March 2016, Krakow (PL)

On 17 March 2016 the HCEU partners met with Polish stakeholders representing the health sector in Krakow (PL). The very first draft of the HCEU matrix on nursing that has been developed throughout the 1st project months by the partners has been put up for discussion.

Workshop participants engaged into intensive and controversial debates on the further development and revision of this early matrix draft. This has been especially the case with regard to the scope of the matrix and the fields of competence it should display in order to fulfill its future role within recognition of foreign qualification. The academic nature of nursing education in Poland revealed here the wide scope of the nursing profession. But also the integration of topics such as ethics and intercultural communication into the matrix engrossed stakeholders and experts discussions. All discussion results have been highly appreciated by the consortium members.

Besides those engaging discussions on the HCEU matrix, a number of expert inputs allowed the consortium partners and their guests to have a deeper look into the projects field of work. Iwona Malinowska-Lipień from Jagiellonian University Medical College introduced recognition praxis within healthcare in Poland and presented the newly launched European Professional Card (EPC) which has just been launched as a tool to facilitate mobility of healthcare professionals within EU by the European institutions. The profile “nurse” is one of the first professional profiles it has been applied on. Luisa Kresse from the HCEU partner Technical University of Dresden (DE) underlined benefits and opportunities of validation as a way to appreciate and make use of learners’ prior learning. Finally Marjan Khobreh (University of Siegen, DE) representing the European project “Pro-Nursing” gave an insight view into the projects results that aims at bridging between tasks, knowledge domains and nursing curricula through continuous vocational education and training and based on a “Nursing Process Ontology”.

The workshop has been a major step forward for the HCEU consortium due to the valuable and constructive input received from the stakeholders but also due to the dedicated exchanges of views and expertise and expert inputs. The partners will built on those results in order to further work on the HCEU matrix on “nursing” and will implement the next workshop of this kind with Austrian stakeholders and experts in Vienna (AT) in September 2016. We greatly thank the Polish experts and stakeholders and our guests from outside Poland who joined our HCEU workshop in Krakow (PL) for their outstanding support and contributions.