ERASMUS+ Project ‘HCEU-HealthCareEurope: Fostering transparency and recognition of prior learning within geographical mobility of professionals in the health care sector’
The HCEU project developed a competence matrix (VQTS-method) for health care professionals in ‚elderly care‘ and ‚nursing‘ . It also created tools and instruments for facilitating validation processes of foreign elderly care and nursing professionals within the project membership countries Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Greece in order to foster mobility.
More than any other sector, already today the health care sector is dependent on the mobility of workers from across Europe even on an international scale in order to overcome skill shortages that are strongly influencing this sector in EU Member States. So far, the mobility of skilled workers is strongly hindered by highly complex and time consuming validation and recognition processes and by missing transparency among health care qualifications in the Euroepan Member States.
HCEU made a major contribution towards transparency of health care qualifications across borders and facilitated processes to formally recognise and validate health care qualifications acquired abroad as well as through in- and non-formal learning within different health care recognition and validation systems in the European Union.
For this purpose, the HCEU consortium (DE, AT, HE, HU, PL) made use of the ‚VQTS‘ model. Based on this approach, HCEU developed VQTS matrices, profiles, tools and instruments for the health care profiles ‚nurse‘ and ‚carer for the elderly‘ for the national contexts of the project partners in order to facilitate recognition practices in between those European Member States.
In addition, HCEU developed transfer kits in order to facilitate the transfer of those tools also to other national (within and beyond Europe) contexts and to other fields within health care. Those tools are expected to make a major contribution to the work of VET providers and recognition bodies/authorities involved in transnational mobility of health care professionals.
In this way, HCEU facilitated the establishment of a European labour market that helps to overcome skill shortages and high unemployment rates through fostering mobility of health care professionals across European Member States.
The project was coordinated by DEKRA Akademie Gmbh, Germany with 3s (Sigrid Nindl, Sabine Schwenk, Viktor Fleischer) as a core partner and additional project partners from Poland, Hungary and Greece.