ELMI: Enhacing Labour Market Integration of elderly families through skills improving

The progressive ageing of the population is a problem that nowadays all countries throughout Europe have to face. Therefore, also the challenge for the health and social care systems will be very huge and the work of informal carers as major care providers will remain crucial or will become even more important.

Unfortunately, the financial crisis have conducted to shortages of local carers and therefore also the European Commission in its Ageing Report recommends to put the pressure on the family to insource rather than outsource care so that the informal care can become a valuable resource on the labour market. Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic are three of the European countries where the care for elderly people lies mostly on the family.

ELMI aspired on offering people taking care of their older relatives the opportunity to deepen their skills in an e-learning course, which would provide them not only valuable information in the field of informal care, but also solid basis for finding a job in this field.

Therefore the ELMI project followed the two aims:

• The transfer of an e-learning training course for informal caregivers from Italy.
• The analysis of its potential transfer to Poland and the Czech Republic

The project ELMI (Enhancing Labour Market Integration of elderly family carers through skills Improving)  was a Leonardo da Vinci Transfer of Innovation project and was part of the Lifelong Learning Programme. The duration of the ELMI project was 2 years. It started on 1st of March 2014 and lasted until the 28th of February 2016. ELMI was financed by the European Commission through the National Agency for Communitary Programmes in the Field of Education and Professional Training in Romania.

There were seven partners from five EU countries involved in the project: Romania, Italy, Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic.

The on-line training course for informal (family) carers of elderly which was transfered from Italy to Romania (and partly to the Czech Republic and to Poland), had a special focus on the care of older persons with Alzheimer dementia. The course’s aim was that informal carers aquire skills in elderly care, allowing them to face the challenges of this role, and also for their ulterior professionalization and integration on the labor market.

The online course had been developed in Italy in 2011 and had been used by almost 400 informal carers so far. It has been available on the website corso.caregiverfamiliare.it and has been composed of 18 didactic parts with a total length of about 60 hours. It was fully adapted in Romania, and there were 2 modules piloted in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Apart from the e-learnig course there were more results:

• On-line platform of ressources for the Romanian informal carers of elderly people, with focus on Alzheimer dementia.
• Handbook for the Romanian informal carers of elderly people referring to the care process, which presented the advantages of the training program in order to obtain the professional re-insertion.
• Concept-paper for a strategy of integration on the labor market of former informal carers who want to become professional carers, strategy that was presented to authorities during a round table.

1. Preparation transmission rate (includes analysis needs of the target groups in Romania and Central Europe).
2. The adaptation of tools for the Italian Romanian specificities (translation rate adaptation because of the different legal conditions in Romania and different social situations).
3. Transferring Italian instruments in Romania (testing the course for 40 people in Romania and selected two modules in the Czech Republic and Poland).
4.  Development of model ECVET (inclusion rate to the credit system in vocational education, the signing of memoranda of understanding).

ELMI already had dissemination materials as a press releases, or leaflets that you could find and download here.

Direct link to 4th press release

Direct link to 5th press release

News

The final conference of the project ELMI took place on 10th of February 2016 in Bucharest. The purpose of this event was to inform the public about the outcomes of our project. For more information about the event visit the website of the project: www.elmiproject.eu or see the final press release

ELMI partners met on 1st and 2nd of October in Prague, Czech Republic for the 4th transnational meeting. Feedback from ELMI pilot tests was discussed and the planning of the final event for the project began.

The third transnational meeting took place in Lodz and its aim was to evaluate the progress of the project and the e-learning courses created and agree on the pilot testing of the courses.The second transnational meeting took place in Bucharest and its aim was to evaluate and interpret the analyses of needs that were created in Rumania, Czech Republic and Poland and to agree on the next steps of the project.

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