Multidisciplinary students’ self-evaluated competence at the beginning of studies in digital health and social care service specialisation education

Digital transformation in health and social care is a fast-growing sector globally. Multidisciplinary professionals are needed in the development of digital health and social care services. This study aimed to evaluate the self-assessments of students participating in specialisation education on the importance of multidisciplinary digital competences, focusing on competence in the digitalisation of social and health care and how they assess their own competences at the beginning of their education. The purpose was to describe the multidisciplinary competences in this area at EQF level 6 by using a self-assessment tool. Data were collected from 274 specialised education students in the years 2021 and 2022 from 14 universities of applied sciences. The background information included participants’ years of work experience, professional education area and study credits. There were nine competence areas. The survey contains 61 Likert scale questions. Cronbach’s alpha was 0.962 (N=126). The paired t-test was used for statistical analyses to determine the relationship between the importance of a competence and students’ current levels of competence. For each pair, the arithmetic mean for the how important variable was higher than the current competence variable. The average means of all competences’ differences was 1.04 between how important the competence was to the students and their current understanding of their own level of the particular competence. Service design competences have both the highest average level of student competence and variance in competence. The second-largest variance was in online guiding competences, which is one of the clearest competences for students to understand the content. These results may be explained by expert bias, where a person with a lot of knowledge rates their own level of knowledge lower, while a person with less knowledge does the opposite. The gap between current competence level and the assessed importance of the particular competence shows that there is a need for specialisation education in multidisciplinary competences for developing digital health and social care services. The overall result is a self-assessment tool that can be used to assess the level of competences in different competence areas in specialisation education. It is important for health and social care organisations to manage the competences and continuing education of their professionals.