DI.S.C.O.P.M.B.: A EUROPEAN PROJECT TO SUPPORT DIVERSITY-SENSITIVE CARE OF OLDER PEOPLE WITH MIGRANT BACKGROUND AND THEIR FAMILIES
Diversity sensitive care of older people with migrant background and their families (DI.S.C.O.P.M.B.) is a 36-month Erasmus+ project aimed at making current and future social and health workers more aware of and competent in providing inclusive care practices, especially those targeting older persons from a migrant background and their informal caregivers.
TRAINING PROGRAMME AND E-LEARNING PLATFORM
The first result of the DI.S.C.O.P.M.B. project consists of the multilingual training programme on person-centred and diversity-sensitive care, aimed at higher education students and practitioners in the social and health care context. This course intends, on the one hand, to support the acquisition by the beneficiaries of the competences and skills needed to provide quality, personalised and inclusive care practices and, on the other hand, to raise awareness about the urgency of including such content in the existing curricula of the social and health care sector. The DI.S.C.O.P.M.B. training programme fits into the epistemological framework of diversity-sensitive care by integrating the purely theoretical contents found in the most recent literature on the topic with storytelling of older persons with migrant background and their formal and family caregivers. Following the Double Diamond model, which is useful for exploring problems and developing innovative solutions, the partnership developed a training curriculum comprising four modules aimed at developing and/or strengthening diversity-sensitive care skills: long-term care, care and diversity, awareness of stereotypes and prejudices, and diversity-sensitive skills. These topics are enriched and complemented with practical and reflective exercises, case studies, narratives of the life stories and experiences of older persons with migration experience and their family and formal caregivers. The training programme will soon be tested and evaluated in the partner countries by a pilot group of at least one hundred students and professionals from the care, health and social work fields. In order to improve the quality of learning, knowledge sharing, improved policy dialogue and global capacity building, an e-learning platform version of the training curriculum (OER), free and open to all, will be created.
POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
The second and final objective of the DI.S.C.O.P.M.B. project is to develop policy recommendations to raise the optimal standard of person-centred and diversity-sensitive healthcare for older persons with a migration background and their families. To this end, workshops were organised in each partner country in which older persons with migration experience and health and social care professionals discussed, collaborated and reflected together on the challenges and possible improvements of access to services. The results of these national workshops will feed into two Policy Briefs, to be launched with the hope that they will influence and inform different stakeholders, from policy makers and NGOs to education professionals, nurses and service providers.
NEXT STEPS
Partners are now working jointly on the finalisation of the DI.S.C.O.P.M.B. training curriculum, which will be tested in autumn 2023. Once this is finished, the DI.S.C.O.P.M.B. training programme will be available on the project website and can be downloaded free of charge in English, Italian, Swedish, German, Finnish and Dutch.
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