Abstract:

Internationally there are different requirements for measuring and monitoring health care practice and cross-border clinical placement. However, the quality of the clinical training has a significant impact on student experience and eventually on the quality of the healthcare services. HEALINT4ALL funded by the Erasmus plus Programme aims to support the development of competent health workforce regardless of cultural, political or educational context. Despite the great diversity due to the different needs, resources, regulations etc., there is a clear need for harmonized minimum training requirements especially for healthcare professions and from those benefiting from automatic recognition across the EU such as doctors, nurses and midwives, as reflected by the EU Directive (2013/55/EU). Student mobility provides the means for future professionals to gain healthcare experiences in different cultural settings and build students confidence, increase employability and career progression. In offering international mobility, universities must ensure that learning environment standards are ethical, safe and commensurate with their own quality assurance processes and those of professional regulators. This is especially so when learning opportunities include clinical practice. For medical professions, demonstrating the quality of clinical practice internationally can be a challenging task. The project innovatively adapts the recently established (HEALINT project) audit protocol and support tools to suit the needs of higher education for wider application in learning environments in medicine and medical-related professionals and also inform them of the stakeholder views and needs. In order to facilitate quality assurance, consistency and raise standards of care, a digital interactive audit platform, supported by access to a central database, which can be easily managed by a provider, is incrementally developed. The triangulation of the evidence obtained from the mapping exercise of the participating countries, including thorough desk review, online surveys, situational analysis and the focus group discussions with the relevant stakeholders, provided the basis for the development of the first part of the digital audit platform. The participatory co-creation methodology involving end-users in workshops to ensure alignment of the digital content with the learning needs of the students is essential to facilitate consistency and assure confidence for all stakeholders in the audit process and its outcomes. This digital audit platform as a pan-European and national placements appraisal in practice, will provide specific guidance following the assessment of HEALINT4ALL protocol developed in the previous stages of the project. The functional audit tool will be enabled for use on portable devices with capability for use by partner universities. It is expected that the audit tool will enable to address organizational climate, quality assurance and individual learning environments separately to enable best use of time and facilitate the inclusion of a number of clinical placement settings within a single organization. This project aims to facilitate an existing gold standard audit benchmark for application with a new group of learners across a wider partnership. HEALINT4ALL contributes to global citizenship as well as health and wellbeing supported by professionals in promoting high standards and best practice in healthcare institutions.

Keywords:

Clinical placement, auditing system, digital interactive audit tool.