ICO leads a European educational project that enables students in Health Sciences in Europe to learn how to offer support for smoking cessation

Over a thousand students from four European countries will test the first online learning tool aimed at combating smoking, a pandemic that, despite being non-transmissible, causes 8 million deaths worldwide every year and 700,000 in the European Union.
The development and testing of this tool are two of the central objectives of the INSTrUCT Project, which started in 2019 with a four-month development and EUR 360,000 funding from the Erasmus+ programme. This project is led by the Tobacco Control Unit at ICO with the collaboration of e-oncology (ICO), the Faculty of Nursery of the University of Navarre, King’s College London, Escuela Superior de Emfermagem de Coimbra, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Universitat de Barcelona, Erasmushogeschool Brussel, and the University of Lleida.

What is the INSTrUCT course?
It is an educational resource available in open to all European universities, aimed at empowering health science students on the psycho-pharmaceutical bases necessary to provide and provide help to stop smoking in clinical practice.

The course has developed by incorporating online pedagogical tools, such as virtual simulation, which allows students to form and train in a virtual environment, increasing theoretical knowledge, in addition to their therapeutic skills and skills. Following the pilot phase at the universities involved during this 2020-2021, the implementation and evaluation of the course will be carried out, which will allow for the incorporation of elements of improvement and the improvement of the dissemination to the other health sciences faculties throughout Europe.

“INSTRUCT is an educational resource that aims to fight the smoking epidemic in Europe and generate a healthier society in Europe” as noted by the project’s PI researcher and member of the ICO Hospitalet Tobacco Control Unit, Cristina Martínez.