CARER+ — Digital Competences for Home Care Workers and Informal Carers

CARER+ (CARERPlus) was an EU-funded project, led by the French vocational training body IPERIA L'Institut, that developed and piloted a Digital Competence Framework and a blended mobile-learning programme to help home care workers and informal (family) carers use tablets and other ICT tools confidently in daily caregiving. It ran from April 2012 to March 2015 under the EU's ICT Policy Support Programme (Digital Agenda for Europe), with a consortium of 13 partner organisations across 8 EU member states.

The training programme, built around 41 identified ICT competences organised into 5 modules under 3 themes, was piloted at 13 sites in France, Italy, Latvia, Romania and Spain over an average of 10 months. It reached a total of 500 users: 200 professional care workers, 50 informal (family) carers, and 250 older people receiving home care whose caregivers took part in the training.

Evaluation surveys found that over 70% of participating care workers and informal carers said they would keep using a tablet device in their caregiving practice after the pilot, and reported that the digital tools had enriched the home care they delivered. Care recipients' quality of life was also reported to improve, particularly in emotional wellbeing and attitudes toward ICT. The project's outputs — including a certification handbook and toolkit — were subsequently maintained by the European digital-inclusion network ALL DIGITAL AISBL.

As with many EU pilot projects, the evidence is limited to self-reported survey data from a modest sample (500 users) collected during a time-bound, grant-funded phase; there is no published independent follow-up confirming whether the training's effects persisted after EU funding ended in 2015.

Read the full analysis: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/how-digital-competence-development-brings-better-care-services-carerplus-project