Increasing Employability and Standards of Elderly ..
Increasing Employability and Standards of Elderly Caregivers through Specialized Training and Innovative Empowerment
Start date: Sep 1, 2014,
End date: Aug 31, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
In most European countries inside the partnership, since a long time, the caregiver is the one who is placed under the full responsibility to care for, supervise, guide and monitor the elderly person who needs care. Very often caregivers lack specific training and the support they offer is based on empirical and tacit knowledge. This background supports the urgent need to map and understand the situation of the caregivers, as well as give them the necessary skills in order to support their work with the elderly at their charge. From the perspective of health and social services in it is crucially important to both identify the hazards of caregiving as well as to develop potential improvements and solutions allowing caregivers to continue caring for as long as they wish to and are able to do so, without jeopardising their own health and wellbeing, financial security, or reducing their expectation of a reasonable quality of life.
The project aims to support the development and implementation of higher standard services for the elderly through specialized training and innovative empowerment of ageing specialists and caregivers in order to assist recognition and validation of informal and non-formal competences and skills and provide increased employment opportunities along with acquisition of key competences of the latter.
Participants: 6 physicians or nurses; 6 psychologists or social workers; 14 NGO staff; 6 public administration staff; 60 caregivers of elderly; 4 actors; 1 theatre director; 1 theatre producer; 1 theatre technician.
Activities: elaboration of framework for the assessment, validation and recognition of informal and non-formal competences of elderly caregivers; elaboration of a unified curriculum on elderly caregiving fundamentals; organization of focus groups with caregivers to identify their emotional needs; elaboration of a workbook for caregivers of seniors; production of 2 videos for the empowerment of the caregivers; virtual and physical training of ageing specialists and caregivers; interactive forum theatre demonstrations; elaboration of a model of intervention to support elderly caregivers in order to reduce public costs; organization of career guidance for caregivers.
Methodology: i). common research of partners to elaborate: the framework for the assessment, validation and recognition of informal and non-formal competences of elderly caregivers; the unified curriculum on elderly caregiving fundamentals; the workbook for caregivers of seniors; model of intervention to support elderly caregivers in order to reduce public costs; ii). Focus groups to identify the emotional needs of caregivers and produce the pedagogical videos by TPT; iii).Cultural Pedagogical Tools’ demonstrations to handle stress and carry out the role of caregiver.
Results: 1 common framework for the assessment, validation and recognition of competences and skills of elderly caregivers; 1 unified curriculum on elderly caregiving fundamentals; 1 workbook for caregivers of seniors; 2 pedagogical videos using CPT for caregivers to fight caregiver’s syndrome; 1 training of ageing specialists – medical training; 1 training of ageing specialists–relational training; 1 model of intervention to support the eldery caregivers in order to reduce public costs; 6 training of informal caregivers at local level; 8 focus groups to identify the caregivers’ needs; 6 career guidance, counselling and support services for caregivers.
The materials resulted from IESEC project will support further development of validation of non-formal and informal learning of caregivers at European, national and local levels. These materials should be seen as a contribution to a set of European guidelines for validation, further development and strengthening will be needed and should be pursued by bringing forward the process of cooperation of interested entities in this field. The framework for the assessment, validation and recognition of informal and non-formal competences and skills concerning elderly caregiving address the wide range of policy-makers and practitioners involved in developing and implementing validation arrangements at different levels.
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