The project aims to innovate the nurses' curriculum, responding to the recent situation created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Supporting socio-health systems with targeted education and professional training policies while attenuating the impact of the crisis in this particularly stricken sector is a crucial challenge facing the EU. As Ursula von der Leyen pointed out, health and digital technologies will be the major points of the European plan by 2030. The implementation of the “From Cure to Care. Digital Education and Spiritual Assistance in Hospital Healthcare” project contributes to these European objectives, starting from nurses who, in this time of crisis, find themselves in the front line of health and social care in the most unprecedented circumstances. More specifically, the project intends to innovate nurses' curriculum developing their skills and competences in two areas in which they do not feel adequately prepared and which are becoming more prominent as a result of the COVID-19 crisis: 1. Digital technologies in order to streamline many administrative processes, assist with onboarding and training, enhance productivity and reduce care variability as well as to learn how to deal with telemedicine; 2. Identification, assessment and management of patients’ religious and spiritual requests in the multicultural contemporary society. During the project the partner consortium will carry out four case-study analyses aimed at exploring nurses’ competencies and skills in the digital field and in religious-spiritual assistance in healthcare during the COVID pandemic. This will lead to a working paper on the improvement of nursing curricula with respect to the inclusion of diverse religious/spiritual needs in healthcare, and how to accommodate these and other needs through digital enhancements to the health system. This will be the starting point for the design of a blended Training Programme in “Digital Competences and Spiritual Assistance in Hospital Healthcare” consisting of: an E-Learning course, face-to-face laboratory work and blended mobility activities, as well as an evaluation of the strength and areas of improvement of the proposed implementation. The online course will be delivered as a pilot course to about 200 HE learners from the four countries represented by the consortium (Italy, Ireland, Spain and Poland). A selected group of 20 students will also have the chance to attend 40 hours of Blended Mobility activity, which will take place in Turin, IT. Participation in the online course will foster the acquisition of novel competencies and skills; in particular, it will guarantee digital literacy and it will provide the skills needed to take advantage of the digital evolution of the healthcare system. The training programme’s main target will be students of Nursing but it will also be open to students of Psychology and Social Sciences (such as aspiring psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and social workers) because these professions too are in the front line in approaching patients’ religious and spiritual needs and, according to the most innovative models for spiritual care in hospitals, they are supposed to work in an interdisciplinary team with sanitary operators. Moreover, during the emergency, psychologists, psychological counsellors and social workers have also experienced increased work volume, intensity and stress levels while struggling to transmute their ordinary face-to-face work into smart working. Through the course design and delivery, the HEIs taking part in the consortium will have the chance to improve their digital educational resources and the digital competences of their education and training staff. In this sense the course will also act as a launching pad to evolve their online offer, considering multilingual and multicultural aspects. Such a programme, based on the E-Learning Course, Modules and face-to-face Laboratory work, may not only be replicated by other European universities integrating it into their curricula, but also adopted by hospitals and clinics for permanent staff training. After the project completion, the online section of the designed course in “Digital Competences and Spiritual Assistance in Hospital Healthcare” will be made available for open access (content will have a CC-BY-NC-SA license) for self-learners on an open-source educational platform. The publication of the course has the goal of disseminating the desirability of including of multicultural religious/spiritual needs in health care, as well as the importance of digital skills – which have become more prominent in the Covid-19 pandemic within this framework. Making the course freely available to the general public, with a self-learning approach, also tends in the direction of promoting easier access to life-long learning tools for a wider range of people, especially those who, due to social or personal conditions, cannot afford to invest in a full Higher Education programme.
FCTC aimed to strengthen the academic curriculum of health professionals (nurses, health and social workers, social policy experts and others) in two areas that emerged as crucial during the Covid19 and are still largely ignored by existing academic/VET curricula: spiritual care and digital literacy (McSherry et al., 2020; McSherry et al., 2021; Timmins et al., 2022). Spiritual competences can be defined as Intrapersonal and interpersonal competences necessary to accounting for and addressing patients’ spiritual needs but also those of nurses. The role of Digital Education in the contemporary society, its importance in the labour market and its role within the green transition process and the achievement of SDGs is well known. However, the pandemic crisis has highlighted the crucial importance of digital competences within the healthcare environment including assistance processes. The global health emergency brought by COVID-19 highlighted the need to support nurses at a time of exceptional workload as well as the importance of to contribute to centralized strategies supporting health and social systems in the delivery of spiritual care interventions, improving both daily practices and the management of patients' spiritual needs that emerged as impellent in times of crisis (Papadopoulos et al., 2021). Indeed, the pandemic was accompanied by a widespread and deep sense of fear, anxiety, isolation, and existential uncertainty that raised, especially from patients admitted to intensive care units and their families, an unprecedented demand for holistic care focused not only on the body, but also on psychosocial and spiritual aspects: these demands have had to be met, facing organizational and practical difficulties, by diversified care figures, such as health care professionals primarily nurses-, psychological and religious representatives (Bahramnezhad and Asgari, 2021; Dantas et al. , 2022; de Diego-Cordero et al., 2022). Supporting the development of these key sets of competencies, within a multicultural perspective, is thus fundamental in light of a new paradigm in healthcare whose importance has been highlighted by Covid19: more centered on holistic care, recognizing the interconnectedness of physical, emotional, and spiritual well- being.
The FCTC project was designed to address the pressing need for curriculum transformation in nursing and other health professions. It recognized the significant impact of the COVID-19 crisis, especially in the healthcare sector. In response, the project aimed to mitigate the crisis's effects by providing innovative educational approaches and professional training to healthcare professionals. Acknowledging the growing importance of digital technologies in healthcare, the project sought to empower healthcare professionals with the necessary skills and competences to effectively utilize these technologies. This encompassed streamlining administrative processes, enhancing productivity, and reducing care variability, ultimately leading to improved patient outcomes. Recognizing the significance of patients' religious and spiritual needs in today's multicultural society, the project emphasized the importance of addressing these needs within a hospital setting. It aimed to support nurses and other health professionals in identifying and fulfilling these needs, integrating spirituality into care. The project also aimed to ensure that healthcare providers were adequately prepared to navigate the diverse religious and spiritual backgrounds of their patients, fostering a patient-centered approach to healthcare delivery