On January 27th, the Santa Maria Health School invited all partner institutions of the GivingCare project to participate in the project’s Kick-Off Meeting, which was held via videoconference.
During this Kick-off meeting, all partner institutions did a brief presentation about their academic history and work, highlighting their potential contribution to the initiative, and introduced their team members for the project. The partner institutions are:
- Santa Maria Health School – Coordinator, Portugal
- APN (Associação Portuguesa de Doentes Neuromusculares) – Portugal
- Filmes da Mente – Portugal
- Eurocarers – Brussels
- Coruña University – Spain
- Jagiellonian University – Poland
- Ljubljana University – Slovenia
Once the introductions were completed, the Santa Maria Health School proceeded to present an overview of the GivingCare project and its key goals. After the presentation, the project members came to an agreement on the next steps to take.
The GivingCare project was there upon initiated. GivingCare aims to empower formal and informal personal caregivers, personal assistants and other health professionals by developing technical, soft and digital skills, as well as responding to the gap in the Higher Education Institutions provision. To do so, the GivingCare team will need to:
1. Formalize the profession of professional caregiver / personal assistant at European level.
2. Structure a new profession with a professional career, remuneration levels and social recognition.
3. Assemble all the necessary training structure, content and support materials.
4. Ensure transferability of training materials for use by family caregivers.
5. With all this, provide a service to the European space, providing it with new professionals, duly qualified, capable of responding to the challenges of an increasingly aging population, with less family support, but with more quality demands regarding care they need.