The Concept of Soteekki
Soteekki is a versatile, multi-functional learning environment designed to allow students to experience various real-life situations that students might encounter in their future professions. It’s open to students studying nursing, physiotherapy and social work. This practice environment includes multiple services and clients, from children to elderly people, allowing students to experience various scenarios.
The idea behind Soteekki is to integrate practical training into the theoretical knowledge already had. Students get to experience entrepreneurship and its management. Soteekki helps students understand what it’s like to plan and execute activities with real clients and patients.
How Soteekki Works
Soteekki functions as both a practice place and a service provider. It is staffed by students under the supervision of teachers. Students gain experience working in multi-professional groups while also contributing to the ordinary days in the lives of people by offering health and social care services.
Roles:
Students at Soteekki are divided into two groups – the blue and red teams. The blue team focuses on physical fitness and health promotion, and the red team’s main themes are mental well-being and social functioning. In these groups, there are two team leaders for each team and the rest of the students work as the “regular members”, who are the ones completing the services in actuality.
Team leaders’ tasks include making the schedules for students and contacting clients as well as managing their contracts. They can choose to only focus on administrative tasks or also do some services too. On the contrary, the regular members do the planning for the services and go out to execute them. They also work on their mini teams and can plan their workshops or projects.
There are also specific areas of responsibility for the teams. These include social media, blog, podcast, work well-being, health technology, and possible workshop team (though everyone is allowed to design one).
Soteekki also has service counsellors who monitor and assess students’ progress in a realistic setting. They go over the clients’ plans before they’re executed and give tips or improvement ideas.
Everyday Reality at Soteekki + Tips:
Students have their services on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. That means that planning for them usually happens on Monday and Tuesday – the planning times are decided by the student groups themselves.
On Mondays there are also team meetings, where last week’s services are gone through, and team members talk about their progression and future plans in their small groups.
For nursing students especially, since they need more hours to complete their practices, planning workshops as an extra is a good idea to get in more hours.
To some services, someone in the service will need to drive the team to the client’s place. That’s why before starting Soteekki will ask about car licenses – sometimes may need to use students’ own cars (gas mileage will be paid back).
How the service and roles often break down in the planning phase – physios will often focus on making plans for the exercising portions, for example, “tuolijumppa” is part of many services. Then social workers often work as quality control for the clients, like making sure the client’s home seems safe. They have also, for example, made quizzes for clients or hosted bingo. Nurses are often in charge of conversation and the clients’ state of health during the services.