19th European Doctoral Conference in Nursing Science Designing the Future of Healthcare – Nurses Taking the Lead

The program and abstract of the EDCNS 2022:  

Call for Abstracts

All PhD-students in health and nursing science were invited to submit an abstract for an oral or a poster presentation. 

Oral presentation

Each presentation will be allocated a maximum of 10 minutes followed by a discussion.

Poster presentation

Posters will be exhibited for the duration of the conference and there will be a poster session to present it. 

Early registration 2-days ticket until June 14^th 2022

• PhD-Students CHF 250
• Professors and other attendees CHF 300

Standard registration 2-days ticket from June 15^th 2022

• PhD-Students CHF 275
• Professors and other attendees CHF 325

Standard registration for Saturday 10^th 2022 only

• Professors and other attendees CHF 200

When effectuating the payment via bank transfer, please specify the name of the person participating in the EDCNS so that the payment can be assigned correctly. Please remember that only after paying you are registered. Payment for early booking must take place before June 15^th, 2022. Please note that by standard booking the payment must take place before August 31^st, 2022. If cancellations are received before August 31^st, 2022, 50% of the fee will be refunded. Cancellations received after this date cannot be refunded.

Force Majeure Clause

If participants fail to take part in the event for any reason, including causes of Force Majeure, the Bern University of Applied Sciences BFH shall not be liable for travel / cancellation fees. Also, the BFH shall not be liable for travel/cancellation fees if the event is cancelled due to Force Majeure or causes beyond the Institutes reasonable control and occurring without its fault or negligence. In both cases the participants themselves are liable for travel/cancellation fees.

Twenty years have passed since a ground-breaking report from the US Institute of Medicine followed by comparable evidence from the World Health Organization’s World Alliance for Patient Safety concluding that medical errors are among the leading causes of death around the world. Progress improving patient safety has been slower than anticipated. The reasons why include insufficient investments in nursing including the transformation of nurse work environments. Research on the impact of nursing on patient safety will be discussed including implications for practice and policy.

A rigorous international evidence base suggests that safe nurse staffing in healthcare settings is associated with better patient outcomes, successful recruitment and retention of health professionals, and higher productivity in healthcare. While most research on nurse staffing has been cross-sectional, increasingly panel studies offer confirmation of the causal links between evidence-based staffing and superior outcomes. The evidence based is now adequate to move on to intervention research with rigorous evaluation studies to determine whether policies to improve nurse staffing causes better healthcare outcomes. The workshop discusses the design and implementation of prospective integrated nurse staffing policy research initiatives in different countries to advance health services research, improve patient outcomes, and enhance recruitment and retention of nurses in clinical care.

The integration of health economics into nursing sciences bears great potential for both disciplines and for the entire health care system. Health economics aims at maximizing population health using scarce resources efficiently. Reallocations of scarce resources in health care can relate to the prioritization of medical interventions or to institutional reforms in service provision or the entire health care system.

Nursing has become increasingly important in medical decision making and in the provision of medical care. To be a major player in shaping the current changes in the health care system, however, nursing scientists must generate robust evidence on the marginal costs and health effects of nursing interventions and new professional roles. At the same time, institutional reforms need to take both the desired and undesired incentives for nurses, physicians and patients into consideration. In this presentation, I discuss empirical methods to inform the efficient allocation of scarce resources in nursing care, show the pitfalls of institutional reforms that alter incentives for individuals and introduce approaches for the empirical evaluation of institutional reforms in a real-world setting.

The efficient allocation of scarce resource in the health care system requires robust evidence about the costs and health effects of alternative medical interventions. In this workshop, we introduce the concept of cost-effectiveness analysis, and explain how it is used for political and medical decision making. We identify essential aspects nursing scientists need to consider in their clinical research projects to generate the evidence base needed to inform medical and political decision making. A strong focus will be put on the collection, analysis and interpretation of cost data in the clinical context.

Today’s healthcare system is permeated with design questions: To what extent does the spatial environment contribute to patient aggression? How can people with dementia better orient themselves in the hospital? How can communication between nurses and foreign-language patients be improved? Or: How must an intensive care unit be designed to sup-port staff’s work processes? In order to be able to answer these com-plex questions, knowledge and competences from different fields are needed.

The lecture will give an overview of evidence-based design in health contexts and show how interprofessional collaboration between re-searchers from different fields, such as design, architecture and nursing can work. It will address both the potential and challenges of interdisci-plinary research using concrete project examples. At the newly founded Swiss Center for Design and Health (SCDH), knowledge and research competences of different disciplines are used to answer complex ques-tions in healthcare and to come up with innovative solutions.

In this workshop, participants will discuss their individual experiences with design problems within health care contexts and with design re-search. Together we will deepen our understanding of what interprofes-sional research in design and health means and which methods are suit-able to include different stakeholders in research processes. Finally, the participants will jointly develop project ideas that require interprofes-sional collaboration and can contribute to design better health care.

It is well known that the transfer of scientific findings into regular clinical practice takes a long time to occur. To address this problem, the Bern University of Applied Sciences together with the University Hospital of Bern, has launched a partnership that has resulted in a research unit – the Academic-Practice Partnership Insel Group. It is composed of an interprofessional and multidisciplinary team and has a strong focus on translational research.

In this workshop, it is intended to illustrate the interprofessional and multidisciplinary approach of the research unit as well as how it is inte-grated into the academic and clinical settings. Methods of bridging these two entities will then be conferred via the presentation of past and current research projects, in which various health care professionals either collaborate with each other, with researchers or professionals from other fields, or both. The workshop will be concluded with a dis-cussion on the challenges and opportunities in translational science.

The Welcome Reception will take place on Thursday, the 8th of September 2022 at 6 pm at the Best Western Plus Hotel Bern. You will have the opportunity to register for the EDCNS conference and network with other participants from around the world. In addition, small snacks and drinks will be served.

• Date: September 8th 2022, from 6 pm to 8 pm
• Venue: Best Western Plus Hotel Bern, Zeughausgasse 9, 3011 Bern, Foyer 2nd floor (see map)
• Website: hotelbern.ch/en/
• The fee for the Welcome Reception is included with participation.

Including Welcome Reception and Conference Dinner

The Conference Dinner will be held on Friday, the 9^th of September 2022 at 7 pm at a popular location. The Kursaal Bern offers a wide range of attractions of the highest quality, superior service and a central but scenic city location. Fine views extend over the historic old town (a UNESCO World Heritage site) to the distant snow-capped Alps. You will be served a dinner that is a treat for all senses in this exclusive atmosphere where the spirit of Bern as a World Heritage Site is palpable.

• Date: September 9^th 2022, at 7 pm
• Venue: Kursaal Bern, Kornhausstrasse 3, 3000 Bern 22, Room Panorama 1
• Getting there: You take tram No. 9 direction Wankdorf Bahnhof from Bern main station to Haltestelle Kursaal. The tram leaves every ten minutes and it takes five minutes to reach the Kursaal. Or you take
• Website: kursaal-bern.ch/en
• The fee for the Conference Dinner is included with participation.
• Relatives only for the Conference Dinner: CHF 80 (please register)

When participating in the EDCNS Conference you might need an accommodation during your stay. To make your stay as comfortable as possible, we have arranged for conference visitors to enjoy special discounts on a number of rooms at selected hotels.

If you reserve your room via the above link, you will receive a complimentary public transit ticket for Bern (Zone 100/101) for during your stay. It will not be necessary to purchase a ticket to reach the conference. On the day of arrival upon reaching Bern, your hotel reservation is equivalent to the public transit ticket from Bern main station to the hotel, or from the Bern airport to the hotel (However, please note that train tickets from other airports or train stations are not included and must be bought separately upon arrival in Switzerland, or online beforehand).

We hope that you’ll find a suitable place to stay in Bern and wish you an exciting and successful EDCNS Conference as well as many unforgettable memories discovering our beautiful city!