Here For You: Fostering Soft Skills of Seniors’ Caregivers

Population ageing is one of the greatest social and economic challenges facing the EU. Due to changes in age demography and growing number of seniors, the demand for qualified caregivers will be increasing parallelly. Preliminary, on the base of the desk research, the soft skills were identified as the crucial ones while working with seniors:

For the purpose of project realisation following target groups were identified:

• formal and informal caregivers of seniors working as a freelancers or working in nursing/care/residential homes, day care centers. This usually includes professional staff like nurses, physiotherapists, speech therapists and caregivers with no medical background.
• People working in centres of culture or senior clubs who are responsible for organising the free time for seniors. Sometimes in these places work professional animators or therapists, but very often those people had no professional background
• Seniors, adult residents of nursing/care/residential homes, day care centres; those who use assistants for living.
• Participants of centres of cultures and senior clubs.
• Owners of nursing/care/residential homes and day care centres and people responsible for HR policy, stakeholders, decision-makers in the field of senior care.

The partnership of Here4U project aims at:

• increasing the level of seniors` caregivers soft skills
• improvement of competences, linked to their professional practices
• empowering seniors` caregivers
• improvement of the level of seniors` service highlighting the emotional and psychological aspect of seniors` care
• fostering relation between caregiver and senior
• improvement of seniors` wellbeing
• increasing participation and learning performance of seniors

For that reason partnership plan at creating the following outputs:

• IO1 – Diagnostic Tool for Assesment of Soft Skills
• IO2 – E-learning platform fostering soft skills improvement
• IO3 – Online course empowering seniors`caregivers – digital guides and materials on increasing their level of crucial soft skills necessary to work with seniors
• IO4 – Advocacy document – the collection of best practices and recommendations gathered and adjusted relatively to the concept of the project