Change management through upskilling and reskilling.

Abstract

BeWell is an Erasmus+ Funded project that kicked-off in July 2022 and will last for 4 years. BeWell is aiming to prepare the health workforce, and more broadly the health ecosystem, to cope with future challenges and the continuously changing societal expectations by developing a strategy on upskilling and reskilling the health workforce in the context of the green and digital transition. 
 BeWell stands for Blueprint alliance for a future hEalth Workforce stratEgy on digital and green skiLLs and serves the objectives of the European Skills Agenda 2020 that aims to support companies and individuals to develop better skills.
 The way health and care is delivered is significantly changing due to a number of major trends. Just to mention a few: demographic change, the increasing number of non-communicable diseases, the consequences of our modern urban lifestyle, the use of digital technologies becoming prominent in all phases of care provision as well as becoming essential for horizontal and vertical integration of care, the ambition to reduce the environmental impact of the health sector activities, etc. To respond to these challenges and to manage these changes, health professionals need different sets of skills if they want to keep the quality of care provision consistently high. Appropriate education, lifelong learning, continuing professional development are the key in this equation.
 BeWell offers to design, develop and implement a digital and green strategy in partnership with a large number of stakeholders representing VET providers, research, professional organisation, social partners, policy-makers, industry and many others. Having mapped the current and future skill needs, emerging occupations, education and training programmes towards the green and digital transitions will be developed and piloted first of all to provide solutions to health professionals, and second of all to help patients to have access to better care. The strategy will ensure that sporadic training initiatives will be coordinated under a long-term common vision addressing not only current skill needs but will also prepare the workforce for the unknown. The strategy will be implemented at local, national and European level through a large-scale partnership under the Pact for Skills.
 All in all, this oral poster session aims to illustrate how health professionals working in primary, secondary, tertiary or informal care settings could benefit from the outputs of the project. Skills matching labour market demands in the context of digital and green transitions will enable health professionals to provide better integrated care services in all settings.