Modelling nursing teacher education and training in Lithuania

Abstract

Rapid development of the society and changes in the demands for people and society health care exert influence upon the changes in the nursing institution concept. Current situation in Lithuania demands from nursing to recover people's and societal health as well as to create all necessary conditions for people to learn to adequately take care of one's own health and develop abilities to preserve it, aiming at reaching the health level achieved in the advanced countries of the world. It is the development of a new attitude to nursing as a science that cannot be identified with other areas of the medical science. Therefore, the most important and inevitable aim is to educate and train a new type of nurses whose core activity would be independent qualified teaching people to take care of their health. Having access to direct contact with people on various levels of health care system, nurses form people's attitude to their health, assist in helping them to understand that health is a value, teach how to maintain and strengthen one's health, develop one's way of life and acquaint with the basics of early disease prevention. In the context of these tendencies, the priorital areas of Lithuania nursing institution reform should be the changes in the nursing positions in the initial health care stage, where the main action direction is health education and teaching of people, as well as basic education and training of nurses and teachers who educate and train them. This article attempts to solve the following issue: what are the ways of preparing a nursing teacher and nursing practice supervisor able to effectively implement the demands of nursing science and vocational education and training reform. The research is based on the most important theoretical assumptions: "pedagogisation" of vocational training is one of the main conditions of successful vocational education and training reform (Sernas V., 1995 [...].