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Education in sustainable development is a goal recognised by a large number of countries and a vital concept in healthcare. It is therefore important that nurse education incorporates elements of sustainable development into nursing education curricula. However, there is limited research on student nurses' attitudes towards sustainability and no comparison of attitudes towards sustainability and its inclusion in the nursing curriculum across Europe.This project aims to assess student nurses' attitudes towards sustainability, its relevance to nursing and its inclusion in the nursing curricula. 1. To assess base-line attitudes at the start of nursing and midwifery training; 2. To compare sustainability awareness between students participating in training in a number of European universities.A comparative survey design using the Sustainability Attitudes in Nursing Survey (SANS_2) questionnaire.Nursing classes of Universities and Nursing Schools in four European countries were investigated using a questionnaire consisting of five sustainability-related items.916 nursing students (UK: 450, Germany: 196, Spain: 124, Switzerland: 146).Standard descriptive and inferential statistical methods were used to establish psychometric quality (Principal Components Analysis, Cronbach's alpha, Pearson correlations) and compare student nurses from the four countries.The reliability of SANS_2 was good (Cronbach's alpha=.82) and the five items loaded on a single factor which explained 58% of variance. ANOVA of the SANS_2 total score showed significant differences between countries with German nursing students showing more sustainability awareness than students from the UK and Spain.SANS_2 is a reliable instrument to assess nursing students' sustainability awareness; there are significant differences in sustainability awareness of students of different European countries. Limitations of the study include non-random sampling, possible method effects and social desirability effects.Sustainability will become increasingly important in clinical practice; greater knowledge about the attitudes of nurses towards sustainability can support the development and testing of sustainability-focused teaching and learning materials.

The United Nations (UN) has designated the 2020s as the “decade of action” to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper responds to the call for universities to join this effort by reviewing how the University of Bath could support the SDGs more fully. A first step is monitor alignment of teaching and research with the 17 SDG goals. Having reviewed how to do this, we then review their role in relation to university management and stakeholder engagement, considering in turn how this can be linked with action on climate change, local collaboration and civic partnerships, engagement with the business sector, international networking, and the role of the SDGs in University league tables and rankings. We conclude with eight recommendations. These cover steps to strengthen a sense of shared purpose among staff and students, increase public awareness of what the University does, and facilitate cross-disciplinary research collaboration and innovative teaching. Universities can choose how far to align themselves with the SDGs over the next decade, but not how far the SDGs will be used by others to evaluate them.

Sustainability and internationalization are considered to be core values of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), but their relationship is rarely investigated. The current study develops a framework to create a sustainable internationalization policy for an HEI; it analyzes how to measure the sustainability of an internationalization policy in two steps. First, this study presents a theoretical framework for a cost-benefit analysis of HEIs’ sustainable internationalization policies using three sustainability pillars (economic, ecological, and social), each with examples for their own measurable indicators. Second, this research operationalizes the economic pillar of the framework to enable a specific measurement of the economic sustainability of internationalization. The empirical analysis identifies the distribution of funding for internationalization as a promising indicator. To demonstrate the implementation of this part of the framework, this study analyzes how German HEIs distribute their monetary investments in internationalization activities to countries worldwide. Using data from the German academic exchange service (DAAD), this research investigates the distribution using descriptive statistics. In a second step, the methodology of the Lorenz curve is empirically applied to the distribution of funding. Universitat Hamburg is used as a case study to visualize the different funding tendencies among German HEIs. The findings suggest that the distribution of resources for internationalization says more about the sustainable character of an HEI than the absolute amount of invested resources. To evaluate the sustainability of an HEI’s internationalization strategy, it is therefore necessary to look at the distribution of target countries in addition to the mere absolute level of funding.