EU-Funded Initiative to Transorm English Language Teaching and Learning for Healthcare Students

Tartu Health Care College Leads a Challenging Project to Promote Nurses’ Multilingual Skills. The project acronym is PERFECT, which stands for “Promoting English Readiness For Effective Care and Trust of Nurses”.

A challenging initiative, co-funded by the European Union, is set to modernize the English language teaching and learning landscape for pre- and in-service nurses. The project, running between December 1, 2024 and November 30, 2027, intends to boost the capacity of five higher educational institutions specialising in training healthcare professionals through a range of steps to boost their English skills and make them feel ready to work with multilingual patients. The project results will be instantly piloted and implemented in East-Tallinn Central Hospital.

Over the forthcoming three years (2024-2027), the project will concentrate on three pivotal directions: redesigning “English for Nursing” course for bachelor students, developing an e-book for pre-and in-service nurses, and piloting the e-book to improve the English skills of in-service nurses.

Led by Tartu Health Care College, Estonia, the consortium comprises 6 partners from Estonia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Ukraine. The collaborative effort seeks to bridge the mismatch in English language demand and capacity for the current and future generation of nurses, intending to facilite their future more internationalized and more multilingual communication for the provision of the better and more compassionate service to the patients.

The global trends put the health care providers into the challenging situation when they need to (1) be able to communicate with the patients whose mother tongue is different from theirs, (2) seek professional development opportunites outside of their country of residence, and (3) stay on top of the latest research in medicine and nursing for more effective care. Solid English skills come instrumental to those specialists who want to remain highly-skilled in the competitive area of medicine and health care provision, develop their careers, and be able to help people regardless of their linguisitc background or despite the potential language barrier. The PERFECT initiative aims to cultivate a new generation of nurses apt for utilizing foreign language communicative skills, fostering open-mindedness, prioritizing pateint-centered approaches, embracing digitalization for self-paced and lifelong learning.

The project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ KA2 Cooperation Partnership in Higher Education, is expected to build the capacity of the participating universities to train more skilled and multilingual healthcare experts.

The partnership includes six following institutions: Tartu Health Care College (Estonia), University of Primorska (Slovenia), University of Rijeka (Croatia), Kharkiv National Pedagogical University, Bukovinian State Medical University, and East-Tallinn Central Hospital.

More information will be available on the PERFECT website.