"<< Background >>The “Hospital of the Future” will bring a shift away from the traditional inpatient facilities and processes, and health care providers have made substantial research in how to create the best outpatient structures and processes. This leads to a situation where patients stay only a few days in the hospital, being rapidly released, followed up by remote monitoring and the responsibility of care transferred to other local health care providers, being closer to the individual citizen. This situation makes it increasingly difficult for the university hospitals to embrace the high number of health care students that need practical internships while studying in university or university of applied science. Internships are a very important part of the health care educations, as they prepare the students for the big responsibility they will have after graduation, where they will be working directly with patients. It is therefore of outmost importance that internships are of high quality, building trust within the students, preparing them for the transition from theory to practice, and ensuring that the students do not experience a “practice chock” when the start working in the clinic.As explained above, this situation with little and short inpatient processes, is becoming a concrete challenge for the European hospitals, as they have a huge responsibility for the education and training of future health care professionals, such as medical doctors and nurse students. The education programs for health care professionals are built around theoretical teaching, at the same time as the students must have a close connection to practice via internships. It is important for the students that they receive substantial ""hands on"" knowledge, competencies and skills while studying, so that they do not, after graduation, get into the “real world and experience a sudden ""practice shock"". This situation will also have a heavy influence on the third factor in the sustainability reflections, as too little practice learning while studying, risk to challenge the quality of care as well as patient safety.<< Objectives >>Based on this situation, the overall aim of the HEAL project is to contribute to the European Health Policy and protect the health of European citizens, through the maintenance of a sustainable European health care, by developing high quality teaching of future medical doctors and nurses, making the “Future Hospitals”, and their staff, apt to provide high quality care and maximum patient safety in the future.The specific objective of the HEAL project is to develop, test and propose an innovative framework for high quality internship, that shows the direction for how traditional internships in hospitals can be combined with other innovative learning and teaching methods, that uses e.g. blended learning, peer learning, group work, simulation, online teaching, video training, covert mentoring etc.In an attempt to change the medicine education programme at the University of Southern Denmark, it became clear that the students lack faith that other forms of learning in an internship than the traditional internships together with an experienced doctor or nurse, can give them the learning and knowledge they need. But as explained above, there is an urgent need to find new solutions, and thus the challenge is to find solutions that the students will trust, and experience that they get an equally good education as before - if not better. The HEAL project will work with these challenges and thus the needs of the students to receive high-quality education, including internships, will be met by the introduction of the innovative framework that the project proposes, which will bring the students into the planning of their own internships in order to improve the faith of the students towards the educational programs, and their engagement in new kinds of internships.<< Implementation >>The HEAL Project has 5 concrete activity phases1)Setting the sceneIn the first phase of the project, a needs assessment and a scoping review will be developed. The needs assessment will determine the concrete needs, opportunities, anxieties, promoting factors and barriers related to the introduction of new learning methods that can be a supplement to the traditional physical internship in the future hospitals.The scoping review will collect and systemise existing knowledge about innovative methods in medical education in internships, identifying the barriers and promoting factors2)DevelopmentBased on the needs assessment and the scoping review, this phase will be the development phase, the HEAL project partners will develop the Innovative Framework, which will be a generic process model, which will guide the end users (students, teaching staff and coordinators of internships) through an internship process from planning, implementation, assessment and evaluation. The model will motivate and promote collaboration, dialogue and co-creation among the end users to ensure high quality internships.3)TestingAfter having developed a prototype of the Innovative Framework for high quality learning in internships, a testing period will follow, where concrete internships are organized and executed through the use of the Innovative Framework. A minimum of 60 students will participate in the testing from each country.A concrete testing plan will be developed for each hospital in close collaboration with the target groups.4)EvaluationAt the same time as implementing the testing phase, the evaluation phase will be implemented. As part of the testing phase for each hospital, a concrete set of success criteria and indicators will be listed and evaluated through questionnaires and focus group interviews.5)ConceptualisationIn this last phase of the project, the innovate framework for high quality learning in internships will be fine-tuned, adapted and finalized based on the input from the evaluation phase, and the following aspects will be added to the prototype; policy and implementation.<< Results >>The HEAL project develops 5 concrete project results;1.Needs assessment The needs assessment, hass been elaborated through co-creation workshops between the main end users of the project, being medical doctor- and nurses students, teaching staff in the hospitals and internship coordinators. The needs assessment will provide a solid base of knowledge, which will feed into the development of the Innovative Framework (IF). Being based on input from the end users, we will ensure, from the very beginning of the project, that the IF corresponds to the expressed needs of end users. A very important factor is to work with the confidence of the students, which will be expressed clearly through this exercise and be dealt with concretely in the development of the IF.2.Scoping ReviewThe scoping review will present a systematic overview of relevant innovative teaching and learning methods, and a description of the barriers and promoting factors related to these methods, in case they should be used in blended learning situations as we imagine the future high-quality internships in hospitals.It will provide a solid base of knowledge and information, which will feed into the development of the IF, as the framework will include and present a limited selection of learning and teaching methods, that seems to be relevant and useful, to complement traditional internships as blended learning programs.3.Innovative framework for high quality teaching in hospital internshipThe Innovative Framework is a process model that can be used to co-create together with medical students, teaching staff in hospitals and internship coordinators, high-quality internships for the students while studying in university or university colleges.The process model will be used as a foundation to plan and execute the implementation and testing phase in the project. The innovative framework will be tested within all participating countries engaging a minimum of 60 students in each country, in a double loop learning process, and will, by the end of the project, stand out as a tested and evaluated innovative process framework to organize and execute high quality internships in hospitals based on blended learning solutions.4.Implementation and Evaluation ReportThe implementation and evaluation report will document the implementation and testing phase in each participating country. The report will include; a) a description of the concrete implementation process, b) a quality assessment of the innovative framework and c) an assessment of the students learning outcome. Within each country, 2 times 4 internships will have been organized, executed, documented and evaluated. A minimum of 60 students in each country will have carried through an internship that has been organized and executed using the IF. The report will feed into the development of the policy and implementation recommendations.5.Policy and Implementation RecommendationsA set of national policy and implementation recommendations for each participating country will be developed giving recommendations on how to include the IF as an official part of national health education programs. On European level, the policy recommendations will describe how the experiences from the project can be included in and make a qualified contribution to the Sector Skills Strategy and the Skills Pact for the Health care sector in Europe."