The academy for health care professions (kbs) belongs to Kliniken Maria Hilf Mönchengladbach as an independent limited company. Kbs understands professional care as a service within the health care system, providing specific therapeutic tasks, competences and effectiveness in cooperation with other health care professions. Professional care demands high technical knowledge and skills and personal competences. The educational mandate of kbs is orientated on the European requirements, based on the European Qualifications Framework, aiming at gaining acting competence in the sense of lifelong learning, thus contributing to quality assurance in caring and nursing. In addition to cure and palliation caring and nursing practice focuses on the aspect of health promotion and prevention. Up to 16 participants will be selected, depending on the cooperation partners’ reception capacity and the participants’ willingness to take part in such a project. The participants, who are to be sent, are in the third or fourth semester of their vocational training and are chosen for the exchange with the help of a special assessment. The main activity of this project will be sending trainees of the vocational trainings health care and elderly care within their practical studies. Abroad they will get the chance to occupy various work placements, such as medical billing, emergency departments, rehabilitation-centers focussing on physical or psychiatric diseases or social aspects, in schools or medical institutions focussing on the therapy of children and young people, in institutions for psychiatric or addiction treatments, in hospitals, dentists’ institutions and facilities for handicapped persons and nursing homes. Letters of intent were exchanged, where the main responsibilities and tasks of the participating institutions were documented. Both sending and receiving exchange students are organized with the help of monitoring. The trainees are accompanied by tutors on the wards of the work placements and by a mentor of the cooperation partner. Aim of the exchange of kbs and the European cooperating partners is the development of the competences concerning the fields of language, profession and culture within the concept of lifelong learning. In addition to that there are the personal competences in the sense of living and working independently in foreign-language countries. Concerning the occupational context there is the aim of enlarging the perspective to the own work situation in not only learning organization of work, nurses’ activities and international concepts like “Primary Nursing”, “Clinical Pathways” or “Family Health Care” theoretically, but in experiencing and evaluating the concrete practical implementation. Moreover, German concepts can be transferred to the receiving institutions and countries. The trainees get the opportunity to compare European countries and to follow-up the idea of professionalism from a professional policy perspective within a wide frame, the European Qualifications Framework. Concerning cultural competence the participants will get the chance to experience and understand various life-worlds during their stay in a foreign culture in order to reflect own experiences and procedures and to undertake a change in perspective. Differing concepts and handlings can be learnt and maybe transferred to the own national professional reality. Language skills concerning the global language English are enabled by the training within the professional and private context.