The celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the Escola Superior de Saúde do Politécnico de Santarém (ESSS) will take place on May 16, in the hall of Professora Maria de Lurdes Asseiro.
The opening of the session will begin with a musical moment, solo piano by Miguel Salguero, followed by an intervention by the Principal of the Escola Superior de Cide do Politecnico de Santarem, Helia Dias, an intervention by the President of the Students’ Association, Ines Santos, the President of the ESSS, Joaquim Simoes, the Mayor of Santarem, Ricardo Gonçalves, He ended the first part of the opening session with the intervention of the President of the Polytechnic of Santarem, João Mutao.
The event will also see a congress, in charge of María de Belém Rosera, Minister of Health from 1995 to 1999, a moment of tribute and, finally, a public recognition of teachers and non-teachers for the service rendered to the Escola Superior de Saúde de Politécnico de Santarém. To end the festivities, the tuna from the Superior School of Health of the Polytechnic of Santarem, Arriba-Ó-Tunapikas, will perform.
Created in 1973 as a School of Nursing, the Escola Superior de Saúde de Santarém (ESSS) today responds to “permanent demands”, adapts to “new situations and scenarios”, and currently has more than half a thousand first- and second-cycle students and employment rates of around 90 percent.
“I see ESSS as a school that is committed to the development of the region in which it operates as well as the country.” Who says it is Helia Dias, the principal of a school that is considered a reference in terms of teaching in the field of health in the country.
“ESSS recognizes work, merit and quality and we assume a training strategy based on collaboration and research”, says the person in charge, stressing that diversification of the training offer in nursing and globalization are two of the factors on which the school is betting.
Through differentiated teaching, based on a model focused on alternating theory/practice that promotes progressive and cumulative development throughout the course, it allows the student to connect with the healthcare context from the first year.
It is equally important to carry out extracurricular activities in close cooperation with the Student Association, which promote personal and social skills that are a precursor to future professional development and a culture of closeness in the academic community, which enhances each individual’s sense of belonging. .
ESSS offers Nursing degrees, graduate degrees, and master’s degrees in community, maternal health, and midwifery nursing, and a master’s in health unit management, as well as an Erasmus Mundus master’s in emergency and critical care nursing, and most recently, a postgraduate course in home hospitalization, a leading course in the country.
For 50 years, the Escola Superior de Saúde de Santarém has graduated around 2,300 students, “who enrich the panorama of regional, national and international health”.
The school has a long history as an institution of higher education, and undertakes the responsibility of developing academic activity in the field of training and lifelong learning, in the service of society and aims at the production, transfer and dissemination of knowledge of a professional nature.
The quality of teaching, research and development, internationalization and integration in cooperation networks stands out. It is an active element in the development of the region and in the continuous improvement of the scientific level of nursing and health, ”he quoted to our newspaper.
ESSS has a diverse training offer, which guarantees qualification in the most competitive markets, and highlights the high employment rate of professionals trained by this higher education institution.
“It should be noted that the ESSS training offer is today at the forefront of mobilizing digital technologies, in line with the challenges of preparing the health professionals of the future, in the different contexts of organizations that provide care,” he emphasizes.
Currently, according to the principal, the school is making its offer in the sense that it is able to break free from the mono-major of the nursing degree, having already made offers for degrees in other training areas in addition to nursing.
“Benefiting from the Plan for Recovery and Resilience (PRR) this year, we have started a postgraduate level training offer, the first in home hospitalization in partnership with Santarem Provincial Hospital, which currently has 28 trainees from all over the country,” the person in charge is instructed.
ESSS has also begun working to contribute to lifelong learning for professionals, both in nursing and in other fields of training, offering so-called mini-credentials.
The number of students in December 2022 was 529 students. Thanks to the offer of graduate studies and mini-degrees, we have, as of today, 607 students in the school,” Helia Dias announced.
“It is a school guided by proximity, and it has invested a lot in the field of research. We have developed projects in several areas, from health promotion, to health literacy among young people. Projects with local and international partners,” he confirms.
He said, “The school was designed for 250 students, and today we have over 600. We have in the project phase an expansion of the physical facilities that we hope will happen as soon as possible.”
“These conditions require the growth of the school’s physical space, which is why it is expected to create new spaces and reconfigure some of the existing spaces to develop the teaching and learning process. ESSS is a school that is aware of current challenges and plans itself towards a demanding and robust future,” says the person in charge.
“In the short term, we would like to establish an experimental and knowledge transfer center that will be implemented in partnership with health organizations in the region,” he said.
“Knowledge is not currently limited to the distance of the school, and the possibility of its transfer is required. Therefore, the goal is to create the conditions for the development of the Center for Experiments and the Transfer of Knowledge, which is a project envisaged in the long term,” he assumed.
Another challenge supposedly focuses on the need to rejuvenate the school’s teaching staff, as the average age is already well over 57. A transversal aspect of nursing professors in general nursing education that is worrisome if we do not intervene in time.
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