Public health nurse education in the Nordic countries.

BACKGROUND: Higher education should promote critical reflection and guide students towards international activities. In the Nordic countries public health nurse educational programmes are mostly based on guidelines issued by national educational authorities, which describe students' learning outcomes. AIM: The aim of this paper is twofold: to give an overview of public health nurse education and service in the Nordic countries and thereby discuss opportunities for collaboration within the programmes. DATA SOURCES AND COMPILATION OF DATA: National legislations for public health nurse education and services are used as data. Since all sources are written in the language of each country, all the authors wrote the parts that describe each countries conditions in English and contributed to the compilation of data. RESULTS: We found both similarities and differences in public health nurse education and services. Opportunities for collaboration between the programmes are discussed. CONCLUSION: Critical reflection by the public health nurse students can be enhanced by arranging collaboration projects, an exchange of clinical placement, and joint master projects. Collaboration among academic staff within the educational programmes, in education and research, have the potential to enhance quality both within public health nurse education and in developing the profession of public health nursing.

Online Education for Vaccination Competence Among Health Sciences Students.

The EDUVAC project aims to develop and implement a web-based course on educating vaccination competence among health sciences students. In the current study students' feedback and evaluation is assessed which guided the partners' efforts to improve the final course content and learning material that will be available for open access. After completing the web-based course, most of the students (N=103, 75.1%) perceived their vaccination knowledge was up to date and their overall participating experience was "above average or excellent (N=119, 86.9%). While, almost all of the students (N=127, 92.7%) found that the web-based course has benefitted them and their future career. Our findings support that the web-based courses can provide satisfactory learning experience to University students and offer flexibility when needed especially in times that remote education is the only option.