RENOVA – Health Management Training for Nursing Professionals
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.