RATIONALEThe Health Sector is very important and has a huge impact on both society and economic environments, in the European Union it employs almost 10% of the total workforce and corresponds to almost 9% of the gross domestic product (GDP).Higher education system provides students of medicine with high standards of cognitive and practical abilities in the field, but transversal skills are becoming also a crucial prerequisite for enhanced performance in health care. The need to deal with intercultural societies, the increasing attention to patient-oriented services, efforts in ensuring a more transparent interaction with patients, require additional training and development of the Medical staff transversal skills. Good clinical communication skills correlate with improved health care outcomes and this is for obvious reasons even more important in Paediatrics.OBJECTIVESThe project aims to identify the most important soft skills for the field of pediatrics, match them with the best teaching methods and strategies, and elaborate guidelines and materials for training the trainers to use these methods and develop future pediatricians soft skills. The project intends to find new solutions to improve communication between children/families and paediatricians through novel, interactive, learner-centered learning materials that will be employed in the building of such skills in pre-service students and residents in paediatrics. Such needs may refer to implementation of ludic activities – interaction with children through games, story telling designed to distract, soothe, and help kids surmount fear of the doctor and deal with pain, stress and anxiety associated with hospital stays while ensuring professionalism and safety.RESULTSThe project will improve the quality and relevance of higher education, by introducing in curricula addressed to pediatricians, specific contents aimed at developing their soft skills to better communicate and interact with children and their families.The project will reinforce the capacity of future and present pediatricians to implement of ludic activities – interaction with children through games, story telling designed to distract, soothe, and help kids surmount fear of the doctor and deal with pain, stress and anxiety associated with hospital stays while ensuring professionalism and safety.The project will qualify trainers in higher education and reach an optimization of pediatric education to better meet the specific current and future needs of infants, children and teenagers, medical employers and other stakeholders.The project will provide future and professional pediatricians with a better understanding of the needs of children and their families as health care consumers, in terms of their demand of good communication skills, patience, time-organization and other such specific skills the project will identify and address, with communication being key factor, likely to enhance understanding and patient and parent adherence to therapy.The project will experiment the development of pediatricians soft-skills through the use of emerging technology-based methods, tools and contents such as: podcasts, video tutorials on team-based learning, problem-solving, scenario-based learning, gamification (simulation games).METHODOLOGYIn order to achieve these results the project will develop and test 3 Intellectual Outputs involving 50 professors/trainers in pediatrics education and 150 among students in pediatrics and pediatriciansThe three intellectual outputs are:Publication on pediatrics soft skills needsThe publication will present the results of a research activity aimed at analysing the expectations of the three main actors of the pediatric health services: doctors, pediatric patients and their parents.Teaching package for trainersThe teaching package will be developed in order to address the needs identified by Intellectual Output 1 and it will contain teaching resources for each identified soft skill and will be made available on the project portal. Content will be organized in modules, and learning Units. Learning package for pediatriciansThe Learning package will assist pediatric students in acquiring and developing the necessary soft skills to enhance the quality and appropriateness of pediatric health services according to the needs and expectations of patients and of their parents.