The project responds to the challenges in social and healthcare by developing new competencies for healthcare professionals. The clients’ needs and expectations have changed considerably during the last decade. The driving forces for the need for healthcare professionals’ new competencies and education are digitalization, limited economical resources and focus on the clients’ self-management of health and wellbeing.

The project is based on the results of another national project administered by the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and the Ministry of Education and Culture. The project published an interim report on the changing competencies required of social and healthcare professionals in the working life. Related to this national project, the results of another national study focused on deepening and diversifying the knowledge base on the future learning needs of social and healthcare professionals  highlighted the need for updating core competencies, but also emphasized the generic learning needs, such as competencies in customer relations, service development, as well as change management related to employment and collaboration.

This project aims at developing model and web-based tools to for evaluating generic professional competencies in the social and healthcare sector. The project also collects the e-learning modules that have been developed in various higher education institutions (academic universities and universities of applied sciences) in Finland to meet the generic competencies to be required in the future.

The innovative aspect of the project is to clarify the case management competencies related to social and healthcare professionals’ roles and tasks in the near future. The project also develops a model for planning, implementing, and evaluating of the continuing education programs for social and healthcare professionals in close collaboration with representatives of the working life.

In addition, the national roadmap for continuing education facilitates the evaluation of the professional competencies of individual social and health care professionals as well as in those of the entire work unit and guides the professionals to select education that meets the required competencies in the future.