AGE leads discussions on user perspectives at the SHAPES dialogue workshop on integrated care

Meeting users’ needs is the key goal of integrated care. This is what we highlighted in a recent EU project workshop looking at different aspects of integrated care.

On 29 October 2020 Carus Consilium Sachsen GmbH hosted, with the support of AGE Platform Europe, the 2^nd Dialogue Workshop of SHAPES, an EU-funded research project of which we are partners. The workshop focused on integrated care and explored the topic from a variety of angles.

The workshop had a total of 124 registered participants and an average of 60 participants connected during the day. It was a dynamic and well-attended event that brought together the SHAPES consortium and stakeholders from across Europe.

The workshop began with a series of initial presentations, which can be retrieved in the SHAPES Youtube channel. Following those presentations, participants broke into four sessions to discussd different challenges in integrated care:

1. Good Practice Examples of Integrated Care, Lessons Learned and Future Concepts
2. User Perspectives on Integrated Care
3. Scaling up solutions for integrated care
4. Disrupting Disintegration – Constructing a new mindset for caring

AGE led session 2 on user perspectives in partnership with Maynooth University. The session invited participants to provide their knowledge and experiences regarding the role of older people in integrated care processes. Following an introduction by AGE that stressed to what extent integration is key for the achievement of quality care, participants took actively the floor to share their perspectives. They highlighted the key role of informal carers and the challenges in adopting innovations in the health and social care sectors. They also reflected on how COVID-19 – which has exposed the shortcomings in the continuity of care – may accelerate the adoption and deployment of integrated care models.

The Dialogue Workshop followed a 4-week awareness campaign in social media led by AGE under the hashtags #SHAPESDialogue and #IntegratedCare. It was the 2^nd of a total of 8 Dialogue Workshops that SHAPES will be organising during the project lifespan. The next is set to take place in April 2021, hosted by the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), on the SHAPES Technological Platform.

SHAPES is a project funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the EU and runs until 2023. It will deliver the first open platform to enable the large-scale deployment of digital solutions for healthy ageing and independent living.

To know more the project, visit the SHAPES website and contact Borja Arrue or Ilenia Gheno. You can also easily sign up to the newsletter here.