The Horizon Europe WELL CARE project (2024-2027) aims to enhance the mental health and resilience of long-term care (LTC) workers and informal carers across Europe. By identifying and promoting effective practices, the project seeks to address challenges such as heavy workloads and stressful conditions. The consortium will investigate and develop innovative solutions, tailored to diverse contexts, with a focus on improving care partnerships. These solutions will be tested in five EU countries (Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Slovenia, Sweden), where the LTC sector presents dissimilar characteristics, analysing policies and providing actionable recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders. More information is available at wellcare-project.eu.

Research on promising good practices and innovative solutions

The project activities, started on 1 January 2024, are currently focused on the search phase to identify promising good practices and innovative solutions in the field implemented in Europe.  According to this, we are asking our members and networks to highlight potential good practices that are implemented directly by our member organisations having the aim to support LTC workers and/or informal carers’ resilience and mental wellbeing, with attention to care partnerships.

If you plan to submit a good practice/innovative solution, please contact irene.bertana@easpd.eu and fill in this form by 30 April 2024.

Inclusion criteria and types of potential good practices to highlight

We are interested in practices implemented from 2013 to 2024, still active/long-standing (or finished for 1-3 years) in EU Member States, the United Kingdom, and in EFTA countries (i.e., Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, and Liechtenstein), with a focus for practices in place in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Sweden.

The following possible examples/types of implemented good practices can be highlighted:

• Primary, secondary and tertiary prevention interventions (e.g., early detection and early treatment programmes, rehabilitation, relapse prevention, providing access to support services).
• Interventions or programmes dealing with organisational models and management approaches and/or targeted at the individual level (e.g., age-management policies, HR policy changes, organisational practices for care relief, reorganisation of care work practices aimed at reducing the workload, innovative digital solutions / initiatives, psychological support, occupational health programmes, group/peer support activities).
• Interventions aimed at mental health and wellbeing, as well as resilience promotion and training initiatives (e.g., psychotherapeutic or psychosocial interventions, psychoeducational programmes on resilience and mental wellbeing for LTC workers and/or informal carers, training programmes for health and care providers/managers on how to support informal carers and/or LTC workers in the care environments).
• Integrated approaches and strategies for stimulating and fostering partnerships for care collaboration and integration between LTC workers and informal carers, in order to favour the sharing of both caring responsibilities and workload, leading to a reduction of care burden.
• Interventions and programmes targeted at LTC workers and/or informal carers with pre-existing mental health conditions, or for favouring work-life balance for LTC workers who are also informal carers (i.e., working carers).
• Community-based initiatives/measures supporting informal carers’ mental health (e.g., voluntary work initiatives providing respite care, support and stress relief).

In highlighting and sharing your implemented good practices, you can promote the work carried out by your organisation and our overall network. This will help make a difference in supporting LTC workers and informal caregivers’ resilience and mental wellbeing across Europe.

If needed, we will request some additional details and/or information to collect and describe the characteristics of the practices. The project partners will then report the key information of the selected good practices in a publication to be released by 30 September 2024, and which will be made publicly available on the project website.