News

Cáritas Coimbra was in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on December 9^th to 10^th, to attend the launch meeting of ValueCare, a new project approved under the H2020 program.

ValueCare aims to contribute to the sustainability of the social and health systems in Europe, as well as to the job satisfaction and well-being of professionals working in these areas. It proposes to provide an integrated and efficient social and health care digital solution to improve the quality of life of older citizens (with cognitive decline, fragile conditions or multiple comorbidities) as well as their formal and informal caregivers. The digital solution it will develop – robust, safe and replicable – will be tested and evaluated by 7 large-scale pilots in Europe.

Cáritas Coimbra, partner of this project, will be the entity responsible for the pilot’s implementation and testing in Portugal. In addition to this task, it will contribute to the definition of ValueCare’s ethical guidelines. In all, the consortium consists of 17 entities from 8 countries of the European Union, with the Erasmus Medical Center (Netherlands) as coordinator.

Sofia Ortet and Willeke van Staalduinen, from Cáritas Coimbra’s Department of Innovation, attended the official launch of the activities in Rotterdam, where they presented the Institution’s role in the development of the project. At this meeting, all partners actively participated, presenting their roles, responsibilities and plans to meet the initially defined goals. Throughout the session, the working group also had the opportunity to jointly detail ValueCare’s mission and operational plan, as well as to optimize the action plan for the first year of the project.

This meeting proved to be a good starting point for the consortium to focus specifically on planning the strategies and actions needed for project development over the next 3 years.