BACKGROUNDStroke is the second leading cause of disability and is clearly associated with old age, with the risk of being hit which doubles in each successive decade from 55 years old on. The dramatic increase of the demand for stroke rehabilitation, due to current epidemiological trends, is putting care providers and direct care workers under pressure.Direct care workers are a key category in all care settings due to their essential role of providing personal care to patients with stroke (e.g., bathing, hygiene, feeding), practical help (e.g., mobility, socialisation, health education) and support to other health professionals in a variety of activities (e.g., basic medications, preparation of medical tools, administration of drug therapy).The ordinary work context direct care workers have to deal with when assisting people with stroke is highly demanding. They are the most burdened group of workers (since they carry out the most essential tasks) and the least trained one (no academic title for their position is required). Vocational training is also lacking, since the context in which they work usually does not stimulate them to engage in lifelong training activities. Even considering all the above mentioned issues, evidence from the literature suggest that if adequately trained, direct-care staff can contribute to greatly improve patients outcomes, e.g. in terms of quality of life, reduction of agitation, promotion of independence etc., at the same time improving their working conditions. Better-trained staff is indeed more likely to benefit from a reduced work-related stress, burden and injuries.GOAL AND OBJECTIVES: The main goal of the iTRAIN project is to make evidence-based knowledge available also for low-skilled direct care workers involved in stroke care and rehabilitation in home care, hospital and nursing home settings. The project aims to translate up-to-date evidence in accessible, engaging and innovative vocational training on stroke for direct care workers, reaching this category of different professionals who are normally excluded from this knowledge. The iTRAIN project objective is to address this training gap by providing a set of mobile-based digital training contents, designed and developed together with patients, their family caregivers, direct care workers and clinical experts in the field. INNOVATIVE TRAINING PACKAGE: A comprehensive vocational training package, publicly available and usable by mobile devices, will be at disposal of direct care workers dealing with stroke survivors. The package will be produced in six European languages (English, Greek, Swedish, Italian, Portuguese, Lithuanian). The package will include five INTELLECTUAL OUTPUTS (IOs): methodological framework for implementation of a digital inclusive training of direct care workers dealing with stroke survivors (IO1); vocational education methodology and handbook (IO2); multimedial training videos of patients, caregivers and experts (IO3); mobile-based serious game for learning and self-assessment (IO4); massive online open course (MOOC) with all multimedial materials.NUMBER OF TARGETED BENEFICIARIESWe will involve, in an interactive co-design, testing and dissemination process, over 2,800 participants, including direct care workers (primary target group), patients, family caregivers, employers, unions, patients' associations, clinical units for stroke, and other stakeholders (secondary and tertiary target groups).RESULTS AND IMPACT The iTRAIN project will create a comprehensive vocational training package, publicly available and usable also by mobile devices, at disposal of direct care workers dealing with stroke survivors for free in six European languages (English, Greek, Swedish, Italian, Portuguese, Lithuanian). The training package characteristics are expected to provide a motivating and enjoyable learning experience for a group of workers usually excluded by lifelong learning activities. The use of an ICT-based gamification approach for delivering the training package will allow establishing both feedback loops to adapt VET provision to end-users needs and an objective tracking systems of learning outcomes. The training package is expected to: improve direct care workers attitudes towards people with stroke and their family caregivers (most of all, their level of empathy and understanding towards these users); improve their knowledge, skills and competences on stroke care and rehabilitation; provide them with practical inputs from best practices in stroke care for stimulating reflections on how to improve their clinical routines.

Although Patient Safety (PS) is a fundamental principle of health care (WHO, 2018), evidence suggests that a significant number of patients are often unintentionally injured whilst receiving health care, resulting in permanent injury, disability, increased length of hospital stay or even death. Nurses as the largest group of healthcare providers, have a central role in patient care with unique perspective in assessing and promoting PS in care settings (Aiken et al, 2013, 2017). In order to manage these challenges, nurse managers (NM) need a broad range of knowledge regarding human resource planning and development, leadership approaches, teamwork techniques, and change management.The NM4SAFETY project aims to improve the quality of nursing working environment as the key factor capable of ensuring PS by strengthening the knowledge and competences of NMs as regards the strategies to minimise missed nursing care, errors of omission, or inappropriate rationing of nursing care.The consortium of the project consists of 4 partners Institutions from 3 Erasmus Programme countries and 1 partner country with complementary knowledge and backgrounds, that will ensure the success of the project activities following a 4 axis methodology: project management, evaluation, dissemination and exploitation activities.The project activities will be delivered mainly through 4 Intellectual outputs: IO1) development of a professional toolkit including a set of tools that learners will be able to use in their daily practice to review the concepts learnt, to strengthen the skills acquired during the training course and evaluate the best practices to be used in their daily practice. IO2) the development of the curriculum and contents that will be used in the blended learning activities IO3) the development of the online platform including networking opportunities and access to the elearning course and the live teaching course. IO4) the implementation and evaluation of the blended learning that will be tested in 20 NM in each country.Multiplier events with 30 local participants and 5 international will be organised per partner to disseminate the event apart from other dissemination activities.

Ageing in place is critical to the future of ageing societies in Europe. Older people’s places are recognised as fundamental to long-term health and wellbeing outcomes - a fact that has been magnified during the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, critically, almost a third of older people in Europe experience neighbourhood deprivation, a fifth encounter a lack of cohesion, a growing number are homeless, and approximately 3 million people continue to reside in institutional settings. There are significant concerns that efforts are failing to support ageing in place. With its development as a field fragmented across disciplines and sectors, and with few researchers equipped to tackle this fragmentation, innovation in research and policy risks stagnation. This is despite the renewed interest and urgency arising from the pandemic in de-institutionalizing later life residential experiences. HOMeAGE will institute an interdisciplinary, intersectoral and international programme of doctoral training and research that drives the development of new leaders in excellence for the advancement of evidence-based innovation on ageing in place. In tackling the three interconnected challenges of (1) needs and systems, (2) home and belonging and (3) rights and voice, HOMeAGE delivers a unique employability and skills development process for doctoral researchers (DRs) ensuring that they can lead the response to current research and policy deficits. HOMeAGE addresses significant demand for DRs who possess essential competencies to overcome challenges concerning Europe’s demographic transition, and ‘sticking points’ in its developing Silver Economy. HOMeAGE directly addresses the critical priority of enabling ‘older people to age in a place that is right for them’ within the WHO’s Global Strategy and Action Plan on Ageing. Crucially, it also addresses strategic themes in the EU Green Paper on Ageing, and key goals within the UN Sustainable Development Agenda concerning equity and sustainability.

ASSESS-DHT will increase the adoption of trustworthy and effective Digital Health Technologies (DHT) across Europe, enabling a more coherent digital single market, for health systems and patients to access DHT from all over Europe and giving industry a European market. We will develop a new assessment framework, beyond the existing models, capable of uniform HTA adoption across Europe, addressing new assessment challenges in Digital Therapeutics, AI and telehealth. Our consortium comprises 4 HTA bodies, the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, 5 academic and not for profit organisations with expertise in EU Regulation, DHT development and assessment methodologies, data protection, data quality, interoperability and cybersecurity. Patients and health professionals are included through the International Diabetes Federation and European Society of Cardiology. We include the DHT industry through companies with products for us to assess through a formal methodology mimicking actual HTA assessments – 3 as partners, some through an open call and industry-wide consultation via DIGITAL EUROPE. We will engage healthcare payers and ministries through our Advisory Board. We will co-create our overarching assessment framework with specialised pathways for different categories of DHT specified through a novel evidence-based typology. We will cater for phased adoption (going beyond fast track models like DiGA), complex life-cycles, iteratively developed AI, consolidated in a comprehensive HTA assessment manual plus specific guides in topics like cybersecurity. We will develop a sustainable repository containing the ASSESS-DHT framework, pathways and unambiguous criteria, a semantically searchable evidence library, checklists and tools to support companies with evidence generation, evidence of health system value from DHT, and online communities of practice.

In 2015, dementia affected 47 million people worldwide, a figure that represents a roughly 5% of the world’s elderly population, and is predicted to increase to 75 million in 2030 and 132 million by 2050. Recent reviews estimate that globally nearly 9.9 million people develop dementia each year; this figure translates into one new case every three seconds.Worldwide, dementia presents a major cause of disability and dependency, impacting significantly on the diseased individuals, carers, families, communities and societies. Consequently, dementia is one of the fields where research is making great strides in identifying potential new ways to help diagnose, treat, and even prevent.EARLYDEM project comes to contribute from an educational point of view into this research by emphasizing on early diagnosis and early intervention as extremely important yet neglected mechanisms of the dementia treatment strategy Based on the above needs and assumptions, the main objective of EARLYDEM project is the training of formal and informal caregivers of elderly people through the development of an open interactive e-learning platform, on early identification of dementia in order to be alert and to act as prompting factors to timely diagnosis. Diagnostic process and time to diagnosis can be substantially improved by involving formal/informal caregivers as a source of support in initial stages of dementia or MCI. Direct target group are formal/informal caregivers and social care professionals (nurses, social workers, nurse aids) in elderly care. Their role is extremely crucial since a) they are the first ones that could discern the signs and initiate a process to diagnosis of MCI and dementia and b) they may impede the timely diagnosis due to lack of awareness and education. Indirect target group are professionals that have contact with elderly people and may initiate a beneficial intervention in terms of timely diagnosis of MCI and dementia (paramedical staff, police officers, fire workers, clerks etc).7 partners coming from Sweden, Italy, Greece and France, are involved: One academic institution (Lund University), four care providers (Trelleborg, ISRAA, AAADRD and FRODIZO) and two technical partner (Tech4Care and Interactive4d).The project is organized into 5 intellectual outputs:IO1. Baseline study of critical parameters that affect early detection of MCI and dementia. The scope of the baseline study is to analyze the basic parameters needed for the education and training of caregivers as a structural component of primary care in order to play an important role in recognizing the signs and overcoming the barriers affecting timely diagnosis. Timely recognition of worrying signs and trained avoidance of suspending factors will significantly decrease the time needed till a diagnosis is made, resulting in better quality of the life for people with MCI and dementia, better social inclusion and possible less expenses in medicines and institutional treatments.IO2.Methodology and development of the education and training content. The content development of EARLYDEM, based on the results from IO1, aims to provide a complete and well established training material in order to support early recognition of dementia through the development of new skills and new competences for older people and professionals, to contribute to lessening the burden of cognitive decline and to safeguard the wellbeing or older beneficiaries. IO3 Platform design The EARLYDEM e-learning platform will be an open educational resource environment under he format of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), offering e-learning modules adapt for use of all formal and informal caregivers and relevant stakeholders. This task is dealing with the implementation of the online training platform that will provide trainers, learners and other stakeholder access to the training material, in appropriate forms that promote interactive and case based learning as well as the means to exchange experiences and opinions through a virtual community of practice.IO4.Piloting and validation of training materialPilots will be designed and applied in accordance to the training modules developed, thus can be used for validating learning, skills acquisition and transferability of the learner's new competencies and skills. In this context, the pilot courses will measure efficiency and the level of positive feedback from both the trainer experts and learner on the clarity, quality, and impact of the material provided. IO5. Sustainability and accreditation planThis output will plan the the sustainability of project outcomes and focus on providing an accreditation scheme for this who will participate in the train during and after the project. Sustainability plans will be produced for the online platform, the training content and the community of stakeholders supported by thes