INCARE

The Project "Supporting Inclusive Development of Community-Based Long-Term Care Services through Participatory Multi-Stakeholder Approaches (InCARE)" aims to promote participatory, innovative and integrated approaches to long-term care policy and service development by focusing on aspects that are critical to system sustainability and innovativeness: adaptive multi-stakeholder cooperative processes, evidence-based decision making.

Objectives:

• To empower local communities, care service users and their families to contribute to and shape the development of care services, ensuring that the social innovations promoted reflect their goals and support needs.
•  Implement (on a pilot basis) innovative community-based long-term care (LTC) services that are co-designed and co-managed in partnership with relevant local stakeholders.
• Empower national and local multi-stakeholder groups to adapt and socially adopt an innovative community-based LTC service by developing a clear vision and plan for LTC system development (Theory of Change) and promotion of coherent national LTC policies.
• Support inclusive and effective policy processes and facilitate the development and adoption of comprehensive national LTC strategies and reforms (including a pathway for scaling up and sustainability of social innovation)
• Strengthen local capacity to generate and utilize a strong evidence base to inform policy and service LTC and to facilitate mutual support and transnational learning communities.

Expected Results/Activities

InCARE will include three main types of activities:

1. Formative research activities in support of policy processes, including the creation of a shared knowledge base for all project partners, detailed situation analyses of the LTC landscape in each country, multi-stakeholder workshops leading to the creation of a Theory of Change map and the generation of policy tools and roadmaps.
2. Country-specific national pilot implementation activities will be designed, implemented and evaluated by local project teams. National partners will focus on 3 distinct service areas: caregiver support and community involvement (Spain); integrated care services (Austria); data infrastructure and technology (North Macedonia).
3. Technical and support activities, including: coordination, evaluation, monitoring and dissemination activities.

Funding

InCARE is financially supported by the European Commission through the EaSI PROGRESS Axis.

InCARE is a transnational research action project co-funded by the European Programme for Employment and Social Innovation “EaSI”. The European Union support for the production of this document does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflects the views only of the authors, and the European Union institutions and bodies cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.