The EU’s eHealth Action Plan 2012-2020 - Innovative healthcare for the 21st century, among other barriers, identified “a lack of awareness of, and confidence in eHealth solutions among patients, citizens and healthcare professionals.” By intercepting at an early stage, in education and training of healthcare professionals, the project at hand, PrepaCare(XR), seeks to develop and strengthen the digital competences of future healthcare professionals (students), instructors, and hospitals. Along the current Priorities of the European Commission 2019-2024, PrepaCare(XR), insofar, follows the priority to enable a Europe fit for the digital age as it empowers a new generation of healthcare professionals to shape the digital future of health and care. PrepaCare(XR) seeks to do so by establishing a room for an exchange of cross-border best practices in healthcare among European Higher Educations and healthcare providers. Available resources of current knowledge creation in learning, teaching, training of a multidisciplinary group of experts in healthcare (FI), medical professionals and engineering (AT, IT) and design and visualisation (PT) participating in the project will be collected and distributed in the form of a data set/ collection. As a next step, comprehensive knowledge of online simulation-based learning in healthcare is considered for co-creation of content. The project will develop a digital learning environment that combines several pedagogical methods and models. Teaching practices and delivery methods vary across organisations and operating cultures. In order to create a common understanding and develop a culture of operation, shared tools and operating models are required to maximise the benefits of the new digital twin. Innovative pedagogical concepts are designed for a tailor-made application in extended reality (XR). The new concepts produced in this frame will be made available as a publication. On the basis of online simulation-based learning, PrepaCare(XR) aims at creating a digital twin for healthcare training by combining the e-resources and activities of all partners by using real-world applications, ICT-enriched learning, and collaborative practices that stress the inclusive nature of learning and teaching opportunities in the various formats (blended, distance, on-site). Visualisation concepts and usability are considered and applied in the various simulations and co-creations to ensure acceptance by end users. Processes are aligned with practice by contributing real-world applications of healthcare providers, hence closing gaps between educational and professional life. In doing so, PrepaCare(XR) enables the shift of healthcare training to blended and distance learning and proposes a new way of educating healthcare professionals to improve the efficiency and competitiveness of the European healthcare sector. This is especially important in the current situation, in which COVID-19 has affected our ways of working, studying, and living. As the project's wider impact is to contribute to the EU4Health action to strengthen the health system by the digital transformation, special attention will be drawn towards dissemination activities. The goal is to address a broad audience of health and care educators and trainers and other stakeholders of the higher education sector. The intellectual outputs stemming from this project will encourage the audience to make use of the results of the project and hence serve added value. While digital competences of all participants are developed and strengthened, better collaborative, innovative opportunities in higher education within the field of health, care, and medical engineering are created. Through the use of XR, PrepaCare(XR) improves the quality of curricula in the four programme countries and be available to the whole university body (not just mobile participants). In times of uncertainty or crisis, the project provides the tools for healthcare educators to support and ensure learning and teaching continues without interruption. For students, it provides an immersive and flexible learning experience, and change to learn about valuable skills that are important in current working life. Insofar, PrepaCare(XR) facilitates the transformation of analogue to blended and distance training and encourages international and intercultural user exchange. As an outlook, PrepaCare(XR) forms the basis for EU4Health 2021-2027 in terms of creating a pool of capable healthcare professionals that will together be able to tackle future crisis scenarios. Europe and beyond will profit from better-educated and well-trained future graduates entering the market with a higher level of employability. Therefore, PrepaCare(XR) represents the first step in a clear vision of novel teaching and training aids and concepts in the field of health and care.
The project PrepaCare(XR) aimed for creating an online course setup, enriched with new technologies like XR solutions and coupled these with state-of-the-art training and simulation activities. The latter needed to be implemented for creation of novel didactic concepts, including new media solutions. Moreover, design guidelines were also put into focus of the project, as this has been shown to be an important influencing factor. Participants as well as facilitators shall have the opportunity to experience real-life use cases, prepare first in a theoretical manner, followed by a more interactive and practical setup, until the final on-site training is performed. This enables all parties to offer continuous learning and training opportunities, open for all user groups – ranging from students to professionals. Therefore, the aims and expected results of the project were a higher quality of education and a sustainable reduction of valuable resources, leading to a more inclusive and innovative healthcare education sector. Another aspect was to provide room for exchange of knowledge practices between engineering and medical sectors, represented by the partner institutions. Sharing resources and expertise on real-world scenarios and resulting in new ideas and approaches are definitely part of the main strategies of this collaboration. This involves also the implementation of the project results in current lecturing activities at all partner institutions.
The healthcare systems all over Europe experience the burden of decreasing staff numbers, while the demographic change leads to overaging populations. Moreover, healthcare education is one of the most cost intensive and time consuming educational efforts currently. Under these circumstances, the main reason for including new technologies in education was to a) support healthcare education institutions, b) increase the number of potential solutions with the goal of reducing costs and c) allow decentralised learning activities. The latter have been shown to be urgently necessary, caused by the Covid19 pandemic. People were not able to move as easy as they were used to. This applied to medical professionals as well as students of such professions. The education institutions were facing the need of online solutions for teaching and training. Besides the choice of a suitable didactic approach, another important aspect of knowledge transfer is the dependency of successful and qualitative teaching and learning on the way it is visualised and scripted, i.e. the design of information.