The Nursing School of Lisbon (ESEL) in Portugal is going through some demographic changes as older staff retire and new faces join the staff, and the team is curious to explore how the wider staff regards the innovation and entrepreneurship capabilities at ESEL. Therefore, a group of staff members in the Nursing Fundamentals department have taken the HEInnovate self-assessment. Some preliminary results based on the smaller scale exercise highlight that ESEL performs well in HEInnovate’s Entrepreneurial Teaching and Learning dimension as they strive to incorporate innovative approaches, new study areas and teaching methodologies. Preparing and supporting entrepreneurs is also important at ESEL. The Nursing Fundamentals Department and the Research Department are working together to establish patents when innovations are created in the Nursing Fundamentals team. There are, however, some areas, including Organisational Capacity, where there is room for some changes. For example, gaining enhanced support from the institutional management to advance innovation at the institution would be crucial for future activities. ESEL and the nursing community beyond ESEL teach students to execute set practices for the jobs that are laid out as present career options. However, there is little room left to be entrepreneurial and explore different fields across departments or new potential career paths in the field of healthcare and nursing.

Professor Eulália Novais participated in the HEInnovate Train the Trainers session in Brussels in the autumn of 2023 and strongly appreciated the experience. She particularly enjoyed meeting other trainees from different academic fields and hearing about their research and projects. She benefitted from hearing other participants’ ideas and seeing them grow over the course of the workshop, and the experience helped inspire her to develop a Blended Intensive Programme (BIP) between ESEL, Universidad Catolica de Valencia in Spain and the University of Zenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina about innovation and entrepreneurship in health, featuring HEInnovate. An Erasmus+ initiative, Blended Intensive Programmes (BIPs) are short, intensive programmes led by at least three higher education institutions that involve innovative learning and teaching, including a blend of virtual learning and short-term physical mobility abroad.

The goal of the BIP is to:

1. Empower students to work with new methodologies to help them think creatively, analyse problems, find solutions, transform ideas into projects, work in heterogeneous groups and effectively communicate their innovative and entrepreneurial ideas
2. Create awareness about global challenges and the importance of what the student can do to contribute to the search for sustainable and innovative solutions in health and nursing
3. Promote collaboration between nursing education institutions in the European Community, whose different experiences and cultures contribute to the development of working groups with the aim of improving the quality of life for patients

So far, the programme has entailed two days of online sessions introducing students to the HEInnovate self-assessment and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The schedule has included a presentation from Barbara Gabriel, one of the members of the HEInnovate Expert Group, who spoke to students about HEInnovate. The in-person week in Portugal will be held in March of next year. The 15 nursing students in attendance have already completed the HEInnovate self-assessment, and they will collaboratively discuss their results at the upcoming in-person session. During the in-person week in March, they will also collaborate in working groups to work towards an innovation to address a UN Sustainable Development Goal of their choice.

Going forward, Professor Novais is planning to share these initial results with the rest of the staff across ESEL later this year and encourage them all to engage with the self-assessment. Though her plans for administering the self-assessment to wider staff are still in development, her tentative idea is to facilitate the analysis of results from the institution-wide self-assessment in groups made up of representatives from different departments. The groups would determine their stronger and weaker areas in the results, and then launch a year-long training process to explore the weaker areas.

Prepared by Charlotte Armstrong, Technopolis Group