Reflections on partnership and co-creation in an EU project: GNurseSim Intercultural Simulation for Caring for Elderly Patients

Reflection within practice-based professions such as nursing allows for personal introspection and critical analysis of situations in order to make sense of practice and ultimately to improve it. It is a core tenet of nurse education to enable sensemaking of actions, emotions, consequences and ultimately, learning. Practice healthcare environments, patients (elderly or otherwise) and staff co-exist in an extremely broad and complex way. Navigating and developing these environments involves reciprocal relationships between professionals, people using services, and communities to enhance care. The term ‘knowledge mobilisation’ is used in the healthcare literature to describe the active, iterative and collaborative process of creating, sharing and using research evidence (Melville-Richards et al 2019). This involves a range of ‘co’-approaches which are used interchangeably within literature i.e. co-production, co-creation and co-design. In this case-based study, a key influence was ‘co-creation’, where students are considered as equal partners rather than consumers of education and where teachers and learners challenge their assumptions as well as perceptions of their respective roles in education. A successful learner-teacher partnership is defined as ‘a collaborative, reciprocal process through which all participants have the opportunity to contribute equally, although not necessarily in the same way, to curricular or pedagogical conceptualization, decision-making, implementation, investigation, or analysis’ (Cook-Sather et al, 2014, pp 6–7). This EU funded project (GNurseSim Intercultural Simulation for Caring for Elderly Patients) provided a practical opportunity to work in partnership with students and shape their own, peers’ and teachers’ learning and clinical practice perspectives.

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