SociALL: Making social care technologies accessible to all
SociALL wants to take advantage of the COVID-led increased use of technological developments to ease the tasks of social care professionals while simultaneously yield better services for patients. SociALL is motivated by the challenges and opportunities brought about by COVID-19 in the field of home care. The pandemic challenged us to adapt our lives – including the provision of health, social, and home care – to isolation, limited resources, strained personnel, and the permanent contagion risk. In this context, the work of care professionals was proven to be critical in ensuring and maintaining the physical and mental well-being of the most vulnerable: elderly, disabled, etc. Yet, while doing so, social care professionals deal with a multitude of risks: demanding work hours, highly volatile human resources (personnel prone to fall sick while caring for patients), strained medical and social care systems, limited resources, health hazards, bureaucratic complexity, ethical issues, etc.
Concurrently, the opportunity for accelerated use of digital tools arose. Such devices and technologies include high-precision telemedicine devices for remote monitoring; smartphone apps; care management software and health algorithms; sensor-based technologies (eg. pendants, bracelets); social networking and communication technologies (eg. senior-friendly smartphones, computers with accessibility features
like Skype), etc.; henceforth, tech-enhanced tools and practices for home care. However, these technologies and their benefits are either little known to or sparsely used in some European countries.
Therefore, SociALL desires to open these technologies to care professionals by:
- identifying the digital literacy and readiness gap between care professionals and
- creating and piloting training to improve the use of tech-enhanced care, doing so to the benefit of both carers and patients.
Main objectives
- Determine the real upskilling needs of care professionals in relation to the use of tech-enhanced tools and practices in the field of care;
- Create training materials matching the upskilling needs and provide tailored solutions via SociALL training package;
- Test the training package suitability for SociALL end users and adaptability to other potential beneficiaries.
Expected results
- Identification of real upskilling needs;
- Creation of tailored training materials and methodology;
- Testing of training materials and methodology for validation;
- Dissemination of training materials and methodology for replication and scalability.
