GeNEdu project’s important step forward: final conferences succeeded in China!

(The event background board at the GDMU campus.)

The FC and IGNS were conducted in accordance with the GeNEdu project plan: the first two days served as the project’s internal platform concentrating on the overall progression status, review of using living labs in nursing curriculum, quality assurance in the whole project life cycle, and summary of the project implementation including finance statement. The last two days focused on academic topics in gerontological nursing development and elderly care services related practices, challenges, and solutions in the form of four keynote lectures by Chines/European experts, six oral presentations, and eight poster shows selected from proposals submitted by the GeNEdu project members. Project members from every partner institution had space to share their gains and pains during their own journey in the past 3.5 years while interacting also with others’ topics throughout the event days.

Prior to conducting the event agenda, the host institution GDMU organised a short Open Ceremony, where the keynote speakers invited by Jamk gave their inspiring speeches: Olli Suominen, Counsellor of Education and Science from Finland Embassy in China, presented in-person on the stage, and Pertti Malkki, Director of Jamk School of Health and Social Studies, shared his aspect via online. Participants of the FC include approximately 40 project members from four countries and representatives of education management, nursing faculty, and international cooperation from the host institution GDMU. There were more people participating in the IGNS than FC, when the topics shifted from project specifications to the academic. In addition to the project members, the participants included well-known experts in the field of gerontological nursing from famous Chinese universities, nurses and clinical experts from elderly care providers in Dongguan area, teachers from other related faculties of GDMU, as well as some GDMU students from healthcare study programmes on bachelor’s and master’s levels.

(Group photo of part of project members at GDMU nursing lab, 18 Sep. 2023.)

By the last day of the event, publishing the Handbook of Developing Gerontological Nursing Education in Chinese Higher Education Institutions (hereinafter as “Handbook”) took place as proposed by the project plan. The Handbook includes all the main activities related to gerontological nursing carried through all work packages, extracts the key contents, and summarises the pedagogical approaches, research methods, concepts and tools developed during the project implementation. The final version of the Handbook is integrated and compiled into Chinese and gets printed as books for further dissemination in China. Jamk team also prepared dozens of USB sticks, in which full versions of the Handbook in both English and Chinese were uploaded, for all the project teams. During the publishing session, the project team of Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands, firstly introduced the Handbook Part 1, Competence framework for Chinese gerontological nursing curriculum. Then, Marjo Palovaara, on behalf of Jamk team, introduced the Part 2, Process of curriculum development and capacity building in gerontological nursing.

(Printed Handbooks and the USBs with Handbook e-version.)

A “Learning Café” session was the last on the event agenda, next to the Handbook publishing. All project members worked on how to maximise the use of project results in long-term, such as further utilisation of living labs, continuous development of the curriculum, attracting students to study gerontological nursing modules, and training of new educators in future. This session consolidated all topics discussed in the previous days and enhanced the feasibility of keeping project impacts on individual, institutional, higher education field, and societal level.

(Project members working at the “Learning Café” session, 21 Sep. 2023.)

At the end of the event, JAMK team collected feekback on the participants’ perception of attending the FC & IGNS through an online and anomous survey, and received 26 answers. The survey result shows a median of satification of the participation: to FC, score 10 out of 10, and to IGNS scored 9.5 out of 10. Many project members expressed the postive feeling of being part of the event, and believe that the event is not a terminator of the project, instead it is seen as a new beginning of future collaboration in more wider scope and deeper scale built on the formed partnership.

For more information of GeNEdu project visit the project website!