Caring for someone can be mentally draining and exhausting. Both informal carers ‒ who provide unpaid care to a close one outside a professional or formal framework ‒ and professional LTC workers, face the potential risk of compromising their mental health and well-being over time.
How can we safeguard their health and resilience?
What if improved integration of LTC could help mitigate such risks ?
Investing in the mental health and wellbeing of informal carers and long-term care workers through the identification, evaluation, and promotion of good practices across Europe.
WELL CARE
is a transdisciplinary and participative project in which informal carers and long-term care (LTC) workers, researchers, NGOs, experts and stakeholder organisations within health and social care, psychology, sociology and gerontology work together to strengthen supports available for improving the mental wellbeing and resilience of all carers.
WELL CARE
focuses on strengthening care partnerships, understood as the coordination, integration, and mutual recognition of care and caring activities performed by informal carers and LTC workers, in a vision of
integrated LTC.
WELL CARE
aims to increase the understanding of successful ways of preventing and managing mental health and wellbeing issues among informal carers and LTC workers. This includes looking at personal factors, the environment, and how organisations can make solutions successful.
WELL CARE
will ultimately develop a set of support measures to address the mental health and wellbeing needs of both informal carers and LTC workers, thus sustaining and enabling a vision of care partnerships between these
two groups.
4 concrete objectives to transform care
1.
Identify 40 good practices reducing risks for both occupational and non-occupational challenges faced by informal carers and LTC workers.
2.
Develop, test, and validate 5-8 innovative solutions across five countries, together with local and national ecosystems of stakeholders.
3.
Analyse EU and national policies, offering actionable recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders.
4.
Establish a sustainable research, innovation, and sharing process, involving key stakeholders at national and European levels.
Resilience is the ability – of individuals and communities – to adapt to adversity, taking into account not only individuals’ internal resources, but also their social environments and the availability of resources within them. In this way, resilience is an integrative process made up of psychological, social, and systemic factors.
The project will consistently consider gender, inclusion and intersectionality perspectives to understand possible inequalities and necessary changes for more fair and inclusive policies and practices.
The WELL CARE project will systematically involve informal carers, LTC workers, persons with LTC needs and stakeholders in national Blended Learning Networks.
WELL CARE: A 48-Month Transdisciplinary Collaboration
Embark on a 48-month journey with WELL CARE, a transdisciplinary and collaborative project. Researchers, NGOs, and expert organisations in health, social care, psychology, sociology, and gerontology join forces to fortify support systems for and with informal carers and LTC workers. Funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe program, the project commenced on January 1, 2024.
Principal Investigator
Elizabeth Hanson, Professor, Dept. Health & Caring Sciences, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, Linnaeus University, Research Director, Swedish Family Care Competence Centre (Nka), Board Member and former President of Eurocarers.
Participating Organizations
Research Organizations
Linnaeus University (coordinator), Sweden; Free University (Vrije Universiteit), Netherlands; National Institute of Health and Science on Ageing (IRCCS INRCA), Italy; Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences, Germany; University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.
Non-profit Organizations and Knowledge Translation Centres
Swedish Family Care Competence Centre (Nka), Netherlands Cares for Each Other (NLZVE); Anziani e Non Solo, Italy; wir pflegen, Germany; Anton Trstenjak Institute of Gerontology and Intergenerational Relations, Slovenia.
European Umbrella Organisations
Mental Health Europe (MHE); Eurocarers; European Ageing Network (EAN); European Association of Service Providers for Persons with Disabilities (EASPD).
