Abstract

In order to prepare healthcare students to be culturally competent and proficient within a diverse health care environment a curriculum is required that offers opportunities with a cultural perspective or experience. However, although the need for health professionals to address issues of diversity and culture are clear (French 1992), there is limited information on strategies that ensure successful integration of cultural awareness in practice or how it should be taught within an educational setting (Campinha-Bacote 1999). The three year Virtual Europe project was part-funded by the Consortium of Institutes of Higher Education in Health and Rehabilitation in Europe. It is a web-based European community (Pulman 2008) from which health education scenarios may be accessed for learning and teaching purposes. Featuring a map allowing access to country specific resources, it is populated with different cultural case studies allowing contrasts between cultures to be examined. Virtual Europe builds on the conceptual model of the UK web-based learning resource Wessex Bay (Pulman et al. 2009) and applies it to an international framework. The Wessex Bay simulated community having already been successfully utilised within the Interprofessional Education curriculum at The School of Health & Social Care in Bournemouth University. At the conclusion of the Virtual Europe project, this paper offers a unique viewpoint on the benefits and limitations surrounding the development and pilot of a European health based simulated community. It discusses how the project has not successfully achieved its targeted objectives and reflects on the barriers which stopped the project from being successfully utilised within European health education curriculums. It contrasts the lessons learned from work on the Wessex Bay virtual community (Scammell et al. 2008) with its international counterpart and offers some suggestions on the practicalities of working on future interprofessional, intercultural e-learning projects.