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Learning from long-Term Care practices for the European Care Strategy

Project description

Making long-term care work for all

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed cracks in Europe’s long-term care systems. Services are inaccessible and costly, creating challenges for care recipients, caregivers and care workers. Sustainable, inclusive solutions are needed. With this in mind, the EU-funded LeTs-Care project aims to combine policy analysis, territorial indicators, ethnography, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and participatory methods across seven countries to examine how concepts such as ‘care’ or ‘integrated care’ differ in context, as well as the policy consequences of this differentiation. Specifically, the project explores the choices, tensions and trade-offs in everyday care practices. Its goal is to provide policymakers and stakeholders with evidence-based, context-sensitive recommendations and a practical toolkit, fostering equitable, sustainable and high-quality long-term care across Europe.

Objective

European societies find themselves in a window of opportunity for the advancement of LTC policies and practices. The pandemic has made clear that there is a need for accessible, affordable and quality services, more equality, protection and inclusion for people in need of care, informal caregivers and care workers, and sustainability. To meet these goals, policy makers, stakeholders and researchers need to comprehend the challenges ahead, the patterns and drivers of inequalities in LTC, the potential contribution of emerging practices and the development of contextualised sustainable practices. LeTs-Care originally combines an ethnographic approach with the analysis of territorial indicators and fuzzy-set/Qualitative analysis to provide a new, in-depth, reflexive understanding of LTC challenges and their diversity across 7 European countries. It will disentangle the meanings of taken-for-granted LTC concepts and illuminate how , e.g. “care” or “integrated care” have different meanings in different contexts. It will produce new evidence and a novel approach to territorial inequalities in LTC, their drivers and interdependencies. The project will conduct 20 ethnographic studies or care practices aimed at improving the wellbeing of care receivers, of care workers and of informal caregivers: ethnographic case studies will comprehend the tensions, trade-offs and choices that underpin these practices and will develop context-sensitive policy recommendations.  Finally, LeT’s-Care will move beyond “best practices” by developing a new, reflexive approach to policy learning and a concrete toolkit. LeTs-Care is based on a strong and diffuse partnership between academic institutions and key LTC stakeholders and policymakers that allow the coproduction of knowledge, enhances the relevance of research and makes a difference. The project’s commitment to Open science will maximise its impact and inform care policies in the agenda in the years to come.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) HORIZON-CL2-2023-TRANSFORMATIONS-01

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA
Net EU contribution
€ 559 713,00
Address
DORSODURO 3246
30123 Venezia
Italy
Region
Nord-Est Veneto Venezia
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 559 713,75

Participants (7)

Partners (16)