ABOUT HEALINT4ALL

To support students in participating in best practice environments, quality processes had to be in place, and this required innovation to ensure audit material resources that were fit for purpose could work well within the situation and provide the correct teaching and learning to train auditors. This was essential to facilitate consistency and assure confidence for all stakeholders in the audit process and its outcomes. Quality-assured clinical learning, including evidence shared across boundaries, supported a globally prepared Medical and PAMS international workforce able to transfer skills and practice and offer the best interventions to enhance patient treatment. Shared evidence was also essential within the EU, due to benefits of free movement of health professionals across borders (EC/36/2005 amendment EU/55/2013) and cross-border healthcare, which included movement of patients to receive treatment (2011/24/EU). Both directives included requirements to ensure parity of competence and standards of professional proficiency, and their very presence pointed to the necessity of cultural appreciation and understanding of the needs of patients across borders. HEALINT4ALL provided Medical Education and Professionals Allied to Medicine with an audit system to facilitate quality assurance of EU clinical learning environments. Students were confident that they could obtain an increased number and variety of safe, optimised learning placements through extensive partnerships developed, thus fostering inclusivity. The opportunity to increase high-quality placements internationally through the broader application of the system to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), International Workshop Agreement (IWA) was explored, as quality assurance was benchmarked to this standard. Development of the skills and knowledge of auditors and auditor trainees to undertake the audit was also critical and was enhanced using new and innovative digital interactive resources. An existing audit tool currently available as an online PDF version was newly developed into a digital interactive resource for auditors in the field to use electronically. This project contributed to global citizenship as well as health and well-being supported by professionals in promoting high standards and best practices, which were exported and disseminated widely across multiple professions and with the capacity to be utilized across the world.

OBJECTIVES

To map and innovatively adapt newly established Audit Protocol and Support tools to suit the Higher Education needs for wider application to medicine and professionals allied to
medicine.

To develop a digital interactive audit tool that could be used in situ via iPads, etc., supported by access to a central database, easily managed by a provider, and suitable for multi-professions.

To develop a virtual interactive learning and teaching resource for auditor preparation and update, which could be cascaded and incorporated into self-directed and blended learning.

To add further languages of the European Union and incorporate partners’ integration of the tools in all languages to facilitate wide use across multi-professions.

Execute an ongoing program of intensive dissemination and impact evaluation to establish the HEALINT Tools and subsequent IWA as the gold-standard audit tool for the assessment of clinical placements supporting international mobility by all healthcare providers.

HEALINT4ALL brought professionals and students from Medicine and PAMS education together with experts in quality assurance standards for healthcare education, health education researchers, and technologists from five countries and six sites of the project. A strengths-based, user-centred, Appreciative Inquiry (AI) approach (Cooperider and Whitney et al. 2005) was adopted for the implementation of HEALINT4ALL. AI permitted the development of outputs with consistency and followed a change management ethos, enabling effective evaluation of activity and impact. This supported activity included user-centred data collection from relevant stakeholders and the use of exploratory results for design and delivery.

EXPECTED RESULTS

Two new audit protocols for audit of hospitals or clinics in the five languages of the project to receive students in Medicine and PAMS education.
A mapping report identifying clinical learning environment requirements of Medical education and PAMS education.
A portable digital interactive tool for auditing pan-European and national placements in practice.
Virtual interactive teaching package for auditors training enabling learning through self and blended learning approaches
Evaluation report of feasibility and acceptability of the system in practice and evaluation of system integrity when compared to other quality standards.
Report on recommendations and best practices for using the audit system for quality assurance of Medicine and PAMS learning environments.