RENOVA – Health Management Training for Nursing Professionals

LogoRenova

From February 2011–January 2013, Searchlighter began played its part along with five other partners from across Europe in RENOVA, a two-year Transfer of Innovation project to enhance training facilities for nursing professionals.

Background

The professional role of nurses is changing throughout the EU: there is more demand for qualifications that go beyond the traditional medical skills, as more nurses are required to play managerial roles at medical institutions. RENOVA proposes that the provision of an adequate educational framework for this professional group would enhance its labour mobility and raise the profile for related educational institutions.

Objective

RENOVA carries the subtitle A knowledge transfer and framework construction for nursing staff across Europe to develop professional skills as Managers. The aim of this Transfer of Innovation (TOI) Action is to support improvements in both quality and innovation in Vocational and Educational Training (VET) systems and practices, and to enhance the mobility of staff for the benefit of health organisations and their personnel. To this end, the project supports experienced nursing staff in acquiring skills and qualifications natural to their professional development into health management.

Approach

RENOVA is looking to develop materials for project-based learning where students make things collectively, tackling real problems under the guidance of experienced practitioners, sharing ideas and working in teams, where tutoring helps students to reflect on their objectives and assumptions, where lecturing felicitously completes learning by giving students the knowledge they need to perform the core activities of their work or interests.

Jobs and Growth

Allowing nursing professionals to develop as managers through the project addresses the need to invest in the right skills and improve the matching of jobs with these skills in the EU. RENOVA is committed to develop professional skills among nursing staff accordingly to labour market needs as set out in the ‘New Skills for New Jobs‘ directive. Especially in new-entrant countries, nursing professionals are in an ideal position to benefit from the aims of the directive with its focus on labour-market development, one that guides RENOVA.

Equal Opportunities

The choice to focus on a profession where there is a preponderance of women allows the project to address issues concerning equality between men and women in their access to professions with authority and status, confronting sexual discrimination that hinders women making progress in their line of work. Management positions offer a challenge to disempowerment, and the partners consider that can be increased effectiveness in the provision of accessible management training for nurses.

Partnership

The consortium gathers partners from four different EU countries – Romania, Poland, UK and France – bringing different economic and cultural experiences that balance the RENOVA objectives. The British and French partners have access to a professional management training culture that has to an extent enabled women while the Polish and Romanian partners have access to nursing professionals that are in an ideal position to benefit from this project-based learning for their development. Partners bring complementary experience to the project, ranging from education and training, health, research and communications, technical training and software development skills for effective VET, being bound together by their collective understanding of the social issues the project is addressing.

Work Programme

TOI projects are commissioned to improve the quality and attractiveness of VET in participating countries by transferring innovations to new legal, systemic, sector, linguistic, socio-cultural and geographic environments. This is achieved by working with transnational partners to generate synergies through the exploitation of current VET innovations. RENOVA is based within the Leonardo da Vinci sub-programme for vocational education and training as a part of the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme.

IGUALA – a gender equality training package

This project will allow the translation and adaptation of a flexible on-line gender equality training package developed in Spain as a result of a project in the framework of the EQUAL Initiative between 2005-2007.

The objective of the project is the development of an Internet-based platform to deliver the Equal Opportunities course for teachers and trainers enhancing education and employability practice under the Lisbon Agenda. The adaptation will take into consideration the national idiosyncrasy of the other members of the partnership comprising SMEs, vocational and training associations, research institutions and non-profit associations.

The aim behind a Leonardo da Vinci Transfer of Innovation project is to improve the quality and attractiveness of Vocational Education and Training (VET) in the participating countries by transferring existing innovations to new environments through working with transnational partners. Innovation transfer projects generate synergies by exploiting existing VET innovations. These innovations can be based on previous Leonardo projects, or on any other national, European or international innovative projects, and can be transferred into vocational training systems and organisations at national, regional, local or sector level.

The partners in the project – from Spain, Bulgaria, Italy, Poland, Portugal, France, Germany and UK – considered the lack of gender skills in training staff. As equality between women and men is a key principle of European policy, gender mainstreaming should be present at the design, development and evaluation of the VET systems. In doing so, it is necessary that VET practitioners and staff linked to the VET system increase their skills and competencies on gender equality.

A study by Eurydice “Gender Differences in Educational Outcomes” from 2010 pointed out that traditional stereotypes are a challenge for establishing gender equality in education in EU member states, and that it is difficult to find gender specialists working in academic institutions who could help trainers, tutors and teachers to design pedagogical units from the gender perspective.

The proposal required the consortium to analyse the needs of the target groups, identify innovations that in principle are suitable, select those that will meet the needs of the target group in the best way, and analyse the feasibility of the blending and the transfer. We explained how the project would blend the selected innovations, adapt them to the legal framework and training system – public, private, sector – as well as adapting them to the language, culture, geography and needs of target groups. We showed how we would transfer them to, and test them in, the new environment, and how we would integrate the transferred innovations into a range of training systems and practices.

There should be a result from this application in June 2011.