Students’, teachers’ and professionals’ perceived knowledge, skills and attitudes about welfare technology

Welfare technology is expected to provide relief especially for the challenges of aging societies. This requires knowledge, skills, and acceptance from health care professionals. This also challenges health and social care education institutes to provide future health care professionals up-to-dated training. Health care staff’s interest and knowledge on welfare technology has been shown to vary. Only little is known about health and social care education teachers’ knowledge, skills and attitudes towards welfare technology. The purpose of this study was to compare health and social care students’, teachers’ and professionals’ perceived knowledge, skills, and attitudes to utilize welfare technology. This information can be used in the development of social and health care education. The cross-sectional quantitative data was collected with online surveys in Finland, Norway, Netherlands, and Portugal. Health and social care students (n=103) and teachers (n=51) were mainly vocational school students and teachers. Health and social care professionals (n=40) were persons, who worked in the care of older adults. They were contacted by educational institutes. Nonparametric Mann-Whitney U test (2-samples) was used to test the difference between students and teachers, students and professionals as well as teachers and professionals. The results suggested that teachers had better theoretical knowledge about welfare technology than students and professionals. However, all these groups had mainly similar knowledge levels regarding more applied knowledge and skills. The results also showed that teachers perceived that nurses’ attitudes to welfare technology were more negative than they were. Health and social care students, teachers, and professionals need further training about welfare technology. Moreover, especially teachers require practical training to be able to provide innovate and motivating welfare technology education for future health and social care professionals.