Abstract:

The increasing demand for healthcare services, driven by the demographic shifts throughout Europe, will increase the number of jobs and the required skills of professionals in the health sector. Health sector will have a 23% increase in employment by 2025 and the skills that health professionals (HPs) possess are the key aspect for the delivery of high quality services to the society. The quality digital skills of the health care professionals are acknowledged to be of extreme importance at EU level.

There is a constant demand and need to enhance the digital skills training in the health care sector. Educational Institutes, VET centers, Health Care Associations, Research Institutes and Enterprises need to exchange skills, experience and accessibility to be embodied in a single high quality training framework improving Digital Skill training all over Europe.

In this paper we present a system that is being developed in EU level and address the aforementioned topics. Novel curricula addressing state of the art methods and contents in health sector are formulated. All the educational material and the courses will be available for free as OER in the web VOOC system that will be created and interested users could assess them and enrol in the courses. Educational content is defined by determining the digital skills every health professional must possess to use eHealth solutions to their full potential after the verification of the specific educational needs of Doctors, Operators and professionals of digital technology of medical imaging equipment. User-adapted training modules on the specific context concerning digital image processing and administration, including recent changes on pedagogical landscape of Health care distance learning with the use of innovative Vocational Open Online Courses (VOOCs) for Digital Skills on health domain topics like medical imaging. After the evaluation of the approach’s functionality through the pilot study over 4 EU countries and adjustment of the educational framework that finally will be accredited using the appropriate EU directives and Agencies of training accreditation, (with SLP Certificates, nano-degrees, badges), improving quality of national and European Education on digital technologies in health sector. Moreover, the system provides the developed open-access training framework additionally with its technical support to the community of Health care professionals of EU. The partnership will work towards the educational framework to be utilized and integrated in national and EU level VET training systems on health. The certification scheme will be formulated by an expert in accreditation and certification in VET and will certify acquire skills of the participating users.

Keywords:

Health professionals, digital skills.