European elderly care experiences labor shortages, lack of qualified workers and a mismatch between capacity and demands, causing stress, burnout, and reduced mental wellbeing among healthcare workers and informal caregivers. Leaders are crucial in promoting supportive working conditions but lack research-based measures to act upon these challenges. Support4Resilience (S4R) will develop, implement, and evaluate a research-based Toolbox to support healthcare leaders in improving healthcare workers’ and informal caregivers’ resilience and mental wellbeing in elderly care. S4R will identify resilience and mental wellbeing factors among healthcare workers and informal caregivers; explore their perspectives and needs; develop new theory on the relationship between individual and organizational resilience, and mental wellbeing; and develop recommendations and cost-effective interventions. The Toolbox with tailormade resources for policy and practical use will be available through an open access S4R Resource Bank. The S4R Toolbox includes three main tools: 1) Mapping and identification, 2) Reflection and education, and 3) Reorganization. Measures are initiated at the organizational level and effects on mental wellbeing and resilience transpire at the frontline of elderly care. The Toolbox covers different situational contexts, types of healthcare providers and health system levels. Elderly care settings in six European countries will implement and evaluate the Toolbox through a process evaluation, effectiveness evaluation, and cost-effectiveness evaluation. S4R provides policymakers, decisions-makers and leaders with solutions for taking action to solve specific risks for healthcare workers’ and informal caregivers’ resilience and mental wellbeing. Thus, pertinent to the work programme, S4R will support the development of resilient health systems in European elderly care through improved leadership capabilities, governance structures, and adaptive capacities.

During cross-border health emergencies, health and care services may be overwhelmed by high numbers of patients requiring unplanned care. Delays and backlogs in regular care, as a result of the stretched health care system, leave millions of patients with regular care needs unattended, resulting in disastrous healthcare outcomes. If poor healthcare outcomes across the population are to be avoided, healthcare systems must become more resilient and flexible and allow for rapid changes in the care delivery services. RAPIDE’s aim is to develop, validate and demonstrate a portfolio of powerful tools that enable healthcare systems to build in robustness of decisions, resilience of the health care professionals and patients and flexibility in the modalities of care delivery, thereby maintaining access to regular care during health emergencies. RAPIDE emphasises opportunities for optimising in-hospital care, but also for relocating care from hospitals to community and home environments without loss of care quality. Thus, the project focuses on two closely-linked challenges – 1: Identifying and predicting how much care, and which care, needs to be moved along the care chain; 2: Identifying and verifying effective, feasible and acceptable ways to make this reconfiguration of care a reality. This will be achieved by (a) resource modelling, which builds comprehensive foresight and forecasting solutions and links them to patient flows optimization, along the whole chain of care, (b) selecting and implementing the best available tools to deliver regular care in new ways. To ensure usability, acceptability and equitable real-world value, RAPIDE will be co-designed and co-validated with stakeholders, from patients, GPs, clinicians and hospital managers to health ministries, pandemic-management and public health agencies. A Table Top Exercise and extensive communication and dissemination will raise awareness of the project’s successes.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common cancer types and its increased occurrence may be attributable to adverse health behaviors, especially in lower socioeconomic status populations. Stemming from the specific risk factors identified with CRC, ONCODIR integrates multidisciplinary research methods from health policy analytics; social and behavioural science; AI-powered multi-omics and retrospective data analytics as well as decision support theories to deliver evidence-based cancer prevention programmes and innovative AI-powered personalised prevention approaches. ONCODIR recognises that the evaluation of the ONCODIR prevention programmes needs to address cost effectiveness, affordability and cost benefit parameters. Thus it will also investigate cost balancing and demand generating financial schemes that will lead to enhanced CRC prevention programmes. The coherent technological ecosystem that ONCODIR is developing is based on robust AI trustworthiness and privacy preserving principles to deploy recommendation services that will be specified by citizens, health policy actors and SSH experts, during three design thinking workshops. SSH research will address aspects such as the life-status, nutritional and social habits in tandem with Economics, Sociology and Local/Regional Cultural identity and Ethics. ONCODIR’s results will be validated in three Laboratory Integration Tests (LITs) and three Large-scale Intervention Pilots (LIPs) in five EU member states, with the active involvement of medical scientists, health care providers, foundations and consortium experts. The ONCODIR consortium is composed of complementary partners, coming from multidisciplinary research, technological and SSH domains, with a proven track record of high-quality research capacity. The carefully structured workplan, embodies a holistic approach toward meeting the ONCODIR objectives and delivering feasible policy-supporting outcomes of significant exploitation potential. This action is part of the Cancer Mission cluster of projects on ‘Prevention and early detection.

The BeWell project aims to form an alliance, to build a movement of all healthcare stakeholders supporting and committed to the development, implementation, and upscaling of the strategy on upskilling and reskilling of the European health workforce.The ultimate project aim is to develop a green and digital skills strategy for the health ecosystem that can be implemented at a local, regional, national, and ultimately at the European level through the Pact for Skills. By addressing the existing skill mismatches and strengthening these competencies, the project will enable the health workforce to be better prepared to face future challenges and adapt to ever-evolving societal contexts. To do this, the project will build comprehensive curricula and training programmes that will target all professionals of the health workforce, including for health students, health professionals (nurses, doctors, operators, managers) and professionals of emerging occupations. The training programmes co-created by universities, VET providers and companies will reach the target populations through initial education and continuing professional development.The project methodology is developed based on principles to respect and unite the diversity of Europe's health ecosystem: Patient centeredness; collaboration and co-creation; inclusiveness and diversity; Inter-sectorality; comparative research; dynamic coverage; digital skills for skill-mix innovations in care integration; green skills, and; environmental sustainability and responsible practice.The consortium consists of 24 beneficiaries and 5 associated partners from 11 countries.The geographical diversity in partners ensures the representation of different cultural, social, political, educational structures, values and traditions. The partnership brings together a substantial and diverse pool of leaders representing stakeholders in the health sector at regional, national, and European levels.