The objective was to increase moral competences and develop a deeper understanding of the importance of moral values and critical thinking in the delivery of nursing care among students, nurses, and potential educators. The specific aims were: -to identify gaps in nurses’ ethics education content at the multinational level and develop a curriculum delivered through a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). -to identify the moral competent nurses’ profile and effective related teaching/learning strategies, translating them into the innovative and transferable education methodology, suitably adjusted to nurses’ applied ethics point of view, to teach the identified contents through the MOOC. -to produce effective learning digital materials and create an online platform hosting the MOOC with long-term free access. -to train an international sample of participants (from partners countries) on moral competences in delivering direct and digital-based care through a pilot MOOC course. -to train a sample of potential nursing educators on how to effectively teach moral competencies at international and national level using the toolkit “Train the Trainers”. -to provide all stakeholders with a Good Practice Guide including all materials produced.
The project aimed at developing moral awareness, the profile of morally competent nurses, and tools supporting the development of moral competent nurses in a context of e-digital transformation. Overall, it was intended at addressing the need of developing ethical and moral competences among nursing students, professional nurses, and potential nurse educators to promote morally based nursing care. In particular, the needs to be addressed with the application of the project were: -the underrepresentation of formal ethical courses in undergraduate/continuing education programmes, as well as the absence of guidelines informing educators regarding the expected morally competent profile of nurses, supporting them to select appropriate contents, methodologies, and evaluation systems. -the Directive 2013/55/EU as recently updated recommending that “lifelong learning resulting in an improvement in knowledge, skills and competences, which may include professional ethics”. -the World Health Organisation recommendations (2016) regarding nurse educators core competences implementation and development. -the challenges introduced by the pandemic, that forced nurses to undertake critical decisions compromising basic ethical and moral values.