Abstract:

In Europe, and especially in countries where the population has a longer life expectancy, the main challenges when addressing health and social services are: the growing demand for social services; austerity measures in the public budgets; the proper supply and quality of health and social services despite the budget decrease; and the need and demand for health care and social services is positively correlated with age. In addition, data from the Second Biennial Report on social services of general interest (2010) stated that Europe shall face some important structural challenges in the health and social services sector: the workforce in health and social services is dominated by women (78%), and there are differences in earnings between men and women working in this sector, the workforce employed is ageing rapidly, there is a higher prevalence of part-time work and temporary contracts, and wage levels in the sector are below those in the economy as a whole.
In this context, the European Consortium called EDU.CARE (Education for Care) emerged to research in this field funded with support from the Lifelong Learning Program (527360-LLP-2012-IT-GRUNDTVIG-GMP) of the European Commission. The Consortium is formed by a group of public and private organizations in Italy, Romania, Poland, and Spain, with different perspective and specificity, to work in education and adult learning projects, who share the aim of bringing innovation and improving effectiveness in lifelong learning processes.
The aim of the project is to develop a Training Program for trainers and carers to transfer knowledge and develop skills to carers in Europe, so as to: change the negative perception of caregivers to the elderly, forward awareness of the role of carers for carers themselves, and revisit their role, supporting active aging. The Training program will include classroom training, coaching, project work and training on platform web 2.0. Training Program. The target populations are trainers, carers, and elderly people.
According to these objectives and these functions of the training system the main topics of the methodology are: needs analysis and scientific review, methodology and evaluation feature, training, project work, and tutoring, Web 2.0 platform design, evaluation of the experiences carried out and format release, dissemination, and exploitation planning. In the learning process 4 different kinds of actions will be used: training (to transfer specific knowledge and develop competences), tutoring (to support trainers and carers in the learning process), evaluation (training program outcomes and improvements) and advice (trainers and carers support other carers in management of elderly). The total sample will involve: 60 trainers, 70 carers and 65 elderly people.
The expected impacts derived from the results of this study are mainly three: 1) to train trainers and carers on care services and to introduce innovative criteria in the interaction between support staff, care institutions, social institutions involved at various levels of elderly; 2) to provide innovation to learning practice thanks to an original and interactive methodology; 3) and to ensure the effective valorization and exploitation of the project results and products.

Keywords:

European research project, innovation, elderly carer, training program.