Welcome!!

Training in the healthcare field has never been easy for different reasons (the human component, the complexity of the contents, the lack of resources…) but in recent decades a factor that has had a great impact on this learning process has been added: the irruption of technology in the biomedical environment. This technological development has obviously meant a great advance for science during the 20th and 21st centuries, but, on the other hand, it has led to the need to find solutions, from the educational centers, to bring the reality of the hospital world closer to the students.

The creation of simulators, tele-training, virtual reality… were concepts that were beginning to be taken into account in the educational field before the beginning of the pandemic because of their potential, but they were always taken with great caution, so that their implementation was often slower than desirable. The events we all know made some of them become protagonists overnight, in an inadequate way, it must be said, but that did not surprise many of us who had seen that they could solve problems inside and outside the classroom.

Four years ago, we began an adventure that aimed to solve this lack of connection of a Vocational Training center with the complex, expensive and sometimes dangerous reality of a hospital center with the presentation of the project called “Interactive Tele-training and mixed reality in biomedical environments”, germ of the project that we present publicly today and that still has, essentially, the same objective: Extended Reality in Biomedical Environments.

 

 

 

It has not been a short or easy journey to get here, to this great opportunity that Erasmus + has given us to materialize what began as a somewhat quixotic idea to improve the training of students of health cycles and has been taking small steps full of lights and shadows, of hard work and more illusion, with moments of doubt, frustration, discouragement, but also of recognition, collaboration and support from many people, such as the countless teachers, students, companies and professionals who told us that they thought it was a magnificent project that met their needs, which gave us the strength not to abandon the cause.

Since the momentum of the Enlaza initiative, a success on the part of the Canary Islands goverment that seeks to support innovation projects linked to Vocational Training, until the recognition of the European Commission with the selection of the project with the CIFP Los Gladiolos as the only VET coordinating center in Spain, 4 years have passed in which we have not stopped looking for ways to solve the lack of means of equipment and biomedical environments existing in the centers. During these years, we want to highlight the role of the management teams that have led the CIFP Los Gladiolos during this period, without whose support this would not have been possible and to whom, from these lines, we thank them for their unconditional confidence in the REEB project.

Of course, evidence in education is an issue that should always be present when we enthusiastically adopt any novelty in the way we learn, and we will keep it in mind in every step we continue to take, but it should also be a path to follow in the search for solutions to new (or not so new) problems in a society that is changing radically in certain aspects, such as labor or in the way we communicate, let alone in the biomedical field.

This has just begun and we have many challenges ahead of us: to demonstrate that the solutions we propose are really effective for our students and useful for teachers and companies in the sector; that it is a transferable and implementable project in healthcare training centers; that it is scalable and with a projection that can be assumed by institutions; that it can be economically assumed by the educational community… We are aware of all this and we have understood this since we decided to accept this great challenge.

To be honest, it must be said that the responsibility of taking the helm of such a large project, with such a high budget (289,000 euros), with so many professionals and institutions of such high quality involved (3 universities, the Basque Health Service and a national benchmark company in BIM technology) and with so many expectations generated, is a little dizzying. But, precisely for this match we have been training hard for such a long time. We will do everything in our power to achieve the objective with which this idea was born: to help vocational training and university students in the biomedical field to receive quality training that will benefit our society. We have three exciting years ahead of us.