Healthcare sector is nowadays more and more moving towards eHealth. Health care education has to respond to these changes, but engineering has the potential to support this shift with education specializations such as health informatics and health technology too. Actually, our engineering education should respond to these demands in the healthcare sector. Like CDIO standard 9 defines CDIO programs should provide support for the collective engineering faculty to improve its competence in the personal and interpersonal skills, and product, process, and system building skills. These skills are developed best in the context of professional engineering practice in healthcare sector. Since joining CDIO initiative Turku University of Applied Sciences has supported faculty competence enhancement by providing opportunities to work short periods in the industry. Typically we have had external funding for creating this kind of collaboration with the industry. All our projects have aimed at mutual benefits in the industry and in the university. The latest project we have had was InnoHealth, which was an ESF funded RDI project from 2012 to 2014. It was a joint effort of two faculties: Faculty of Business, ICT and Life Sciences and Faculty of Health and Wellbeing. The aim of the project and the working life periods were to develop education and faculty competence by improving interprofessional collaboration, utilizing health informatics and supporting practice to meet the challenges of working life in eHealth sector. The project implementation included 1) 1 – 2- months working life periods for lecturers, 2) short training seminars and sessions for the working life partners and 3) workshops and student projects. During the project 11 health care lecturers and 10 engineering lecturers were involved in the project. The practice placements situated in South-West Finland and were chosen by the lecturers’ personal interests, but the places had to have a connection to healthcare sector. For each working life period a set of goals were defined from both perspectives: the industry and the university. The project results show that our faculty’s personal and interpersonal competence has improved, our teaching is more working life relevant, new collaboration has started with the industry and collaboration within the university has increased as well. The results show positive feedback from the industry perspective as well. In this paper we describe the project in detail. We will provide examples of the working life periods and describe two cases in detail. Finally, we will conclude with the overall analysis on the enhancement of faculty competence.
Proceedings of the 11th International CDIO Conference, Chengdu, China, June 8-11 2015