Digital resources in dementia care: Co-production workshops with experts in dementia

The AppForDem project aimed to create a set of open and multilingual educational resources on dementia, with the purpose of offering digital resources that support formal and informal carers in caring for people with dementia.

According to the training curriculum defined in the first phase of the project, the second phase aimed to create and validate the educational app “Dementia and daily living” and the e-learning course “Specialised care for people with dementia”. After developing the contents, the partners organised two different workshops in each partner country which involved a total of 28 experts in dementia, both from health care and social sector. The two workshops, one focused on the content of the e-learning course and the other on the educational app, allowed the partners to collect opinions and suggestions about the contents in order to adapt them as much as possible to the national realities of care and to the needs of the end users.

Once the contents were finalised and the digital resources and the guide of use developed, in October 2021 each partner organised an expert group to validate the results of this second phase of the project. Participants have been professionals from the health and long-term care sector (nursing homes, dementia units, day centres, home services, hospitals, etc.), dementia and social experts from public administration and NGOs (elderly associations, humanitarian organisations, Alzheimer associations, etc.), as well as researchers and trainers from the vocational training and higher education sectors.

In these events, each partner presented the guide of use, the educational app “Dementia and daily living” and the e-learning course “Specialized care for people with dementia“. The experts who participated in these national events were very satisfied with the proposed resources, giving positive feedback both in terms of usefulness and innovativeness.  They also emphasised that the learning contents will be positively received by the project’s target groups. The resources are available on the project website at the link https://www.appfordem.eu/project-results.

Next steps

In November 2021, the partners will test in Spain, Italy and Romania the app and the e-learning course with the target groups of the project: teachers, trainers, students, professionals of the healthcare sector, and formal and informal caregivers. The pilot phase will focus on the validation by the target groups of the learning content and methodology, as well as on the technical and learning load aspects.

To participate in the national pilot experiences, you can contact the partners through the project website www.appfordem.eu/partnership or at the following email address appfordemproject@gmail.com.

Do you want to know more?

To learn more about the project please visit our website https://www.appfordem.eu/