Eula Miller and I have travelled to Turku in Finland to participate in their annual international week. This is a conference involving both students and staff and a number of international guests invited to speak on a range of topics. Eula has been talking about the concept of building resilience in nursing students and I have been talking about the development of electronic records access for patients and the development of our simulation within nursing.
This year there was over 20 international guests from countries including Lithuania, Latvia, USA, Iceland, Turkey, China, Portugal, Spain, Belguim, Italy, Netherlands and of course we represented the UK. The speakers are from a range of professions including medicine, nursing, midwifery, social work, pharmacy, psychology speech and language and sciences.
The conference is in English which is always very humbling as neither Eula or I would be able to deliver a conference paper in another language! The students nursing, paramedics, physiotherpists both under graduate and post grad take part and it is a great opportunity for everyone to learn from each other.
Part of the conference is to visit areas of the university including the simulation suite and this was very informative and seeing the students performing simulation in English is again a very humbling experience as I cannot imagine our students feeling comfortable performing such skills in another language!
Thursday we had a networking trip up the archipelago to Manheim in Sweden which enabled us all to identify commonalities in terms of research and project work. We have many common interests including long term conditions and supporting older people’s health and well being and development of health literacy and use of technology in health care. There are a range of opportunities for us to work together in the future and excitingly we have agreed with the nursing programme in Turku that we will develop buddy links for students in our programme using Nursing Buddies. We hope that we can start to develop our network further and provide opportunities for our students to link with the Finnish students and communicate in common topics.
The beautiful archipelago
MMU Department of Nursing 
Wishes from Turku Finland! We were so grateful and happy to have you here in our university. Internationalization is our common goal.
Hi Katja It was great to see you again and brilliant that we are moving forward on the Nursing Buddies development. We have two September 15 students who are keen to lead on the development of learning between the English and Finnish students and we will set up some learning forums for them once they have joined up. Hopefully we can take forward the research and development of the Health Information Technology we discussed and I will keep you posted with my research