Project ‘From Cure to Care’
‘From Cure to Care’
Department website | Facebook | Project website
The University of Torino, under the guidance of Prof. Stefania Palmisano (PI), is the coordinator of the project ‘From Cure to Care’ (hereafter FCTC), DIGITAL EDUCATION AND SPIRITUAL ASSISTANCE IN HOSPITAL HEALTHCARE, which has been co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Commission with the aim of enriching the curriculum of future health professionals (nurses, social workers and social scientists interested in the topic) introducing the subjects ‘Digital Competences’ and ‘Spiritual Assistance’ for better responding to the patients’ needs.
The Covid-19 pandemic brought worldwide paradigmatic changes within health systems and prompted reflections on the crucial role played by nurses and health professionals in providing empathic and existential relief to their patients.
The narrative reported by the media, alongside a plethora of personal accounts, well captures the fact that during the pandemic health professionals recognized the importance of supporting the existential and personal needs of their patients – and of their families – during such a dramatic phase of life. During patients’ isolation in intensive care, in fact, nurses – alongside other health professionals – facilitated the contact between patients and their families, using mobile technologies such as tablets and smartphones and a variety of video tools, such as WhatsApp.
As a consequence, designing a new training curriculum on ‘Digital Competences’ and ‘Spiritual Assistance’ in healthcare is now particularly timely. More specifically, FCTC adopts a multidisciplinary perspective which makes the FCTC curriculum innovative. FCTC involves 5 academic institutions in 4 countries: University of Torino (Italy), University College of Dublin (Ireland), Universidad de Extremadura and Universidad Internacional de la Rioja (Spain), and finally University of Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego w Warszawie (Poland). Each University will deliver part of course accounting for its expertise and discipline specific focus as you can see here below.
The Training Programme grants 6 cfu, foresees a final evaluation, and will be designed over 125 hours, divided into 3 parts:
A. E-Learning Course: Modules (70 h)
- UNIR 10-hour module “Digital Skills for interaction”
- UNITO 15-hour module “Spirituality and care in hospitals”
- UKSWW 15-hour module “Managing religious diversity”
- UCD 15-hour module “Spiritual nursing care interventions for end-of-life care during the COVID-19 pandemic”
- UEx 15-hour module “Narrative Medicine”
B. Face-to-face laboratory work (15 h per country)
Each university locally organises practical-experience laboratories for its own students in its own language
C. Blended Mobility in UNITO
5 days Blended Mobility workshop for 5 students from the 4 countries (40 hours)
The Training Programme will be an innovative interdisciplinary prototypical course aimed at copying with patient’s spiritual-religious demands in a digitally-empowered socio-health system.
The attendance to the Training Programme is subject to the participation to a call for applicants open to all students enrolled in the Master programmes of the CPS Department. The selection committee will select 30 students to participate in the above-mentioned Training Programme. A knowledge of English language at minimum level B1 (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) will be required. More information about the call, selection criteria and deadlines will be published in due time.
You can follow the development of the FCTC project and the upcoming events on the Website of the project and on its Facebook Page “From Cure To Care”.
The call for the course will be open for a few weeks starting from early Spring 2022. We will update this page with more thorough information regarding the duration of the call and the application process in due time.
To know more about the project do not hesitate to contact us at the following email: stefania.palmisano@unito.it