BEWELL is an Erasmus+ 4-year EU project on digital skills, in which the EFN is a key partner. Its main aim is to build a movement of some key healthcare stakeholders for supporting, developing and implementing an EU strategy on upskilling and reskilling of the European healthcare workforce. Its ultimate goal is to develop a green and digital skills’ strategy for the healthcare ecosystem that can be implemented at a local, regional, national, and ultimately at the European level through the Pact for Skills, in the context of the Blueprint for sectoral cooperation on skills.
The role of EFN is key in most Work Packages (WPs), especially in WP3 which aims to elaborate a strategy for the European Healthcare Ecosystem characterised by a systemic and structural impact on reducing skills shortages, always ensuring appropriate quality and levels of skills. This will be based on WP2 mapping of existing upskilling and reskilling initiatives.
The EFN will elaborate, with consortium stakeholders, the exploitation plan once the main results are achieved in WP4, WP5 and WP6 focussing on the development of a qualification matrix and certification and the definition and pilot delivery of curricula and training programmes.
Importantly, the EFN will be taking part in WP9 to deliver on the communication and dissemination activities.
To advance the project developments to support nurses and nursing, the EFN participated at the 2-Days’ Workshop that took place in Brussels on 19 and 20 October 2022. The aim was to create a common vision across the different stakeholders’ views through establishing an EU roadmap for the strategy with concrete milestones to implement realistic targets.
The EFN expressed the need to focus on the working conditions of nurses as the important starting point for creating an impactful strategy, and to focus the attention on the social factors which bring nurses to leave the nursing profession massively. In addition, the EFN stressed the need to engage nurses as co-creators of digital skills and tools in order to develop something which can really facilitate job satisfaction as it reduces the nurse’s workload. Furthermore, in the context of skills and education, from an EFN perspective it is important to support and implement the Directive 2013/55/EU on mutual recognition of professional qualifications. Nurses’ high-quality skills and knowledge is key for the well-being and the well-functioning of the entire healthcare system.
In these 2 challenging days, the EFN, together with allied partners, launched the foundations to elaborate the first draft roadmap and Manifesto, as requested by the European Commission. A first Brain storming activity took place creating a Manifesto focusing on 4 points:
The key challenges will be the resistance of the healthcare workforce to the digitalisation, especially at these difficult times. Concerning the green skills, the definition will be one of the key challenge. However, the main challenge will be the disruptive and continuous evolving nature of digital technologies. Therefore, it will become an ambition for developers to tray the right way to explain to healthcare professionals these new skills and use frontline nurses’ “language”.