The CARESS Virtual Community of Practice for home care professionals soon available!

The CARESS consortium has recently completed the development of its Virtual Community of Practice (VCP) Platform. This platform will provide an online means for home care professionals across Europe to interact, share their concerts, exchange information and, ultimately, to deepen their knowledge and expertise in care for older people.

The VCP Platform is the answer of the CARESS consortium to the need of overcoming well-known skill gaps in home care by complementing formal education (as provided by Vocational Training and Higher Education institutions), with a more informal training based on the exchange of experiences, concerns and knowledge among the professionals themselves.

The VCP Platform, technically developed on top of well-proven social network solutions, provides easy-to-use features for the creation and moderation of groups of interest, the uploading and sharing of multimedia material, the setting up of synchronous events, the support of one-to-one messaging and discussion forums, the rating of others’ contributions, etc. Additionally, the VCP Platform is seamlessly integrated with a Moodle platform in order to facilitate the access to online courses to be set up by training institutions. All in all, the VCP Platform will be the online “meeting point” for professionals in the home care domain across Europe.

The VCP Platform is currently undergoing internal tests and will be ready for entering service as part of the CARESS pilots that are starting to take place in Finland, Italy and Spain. The participants in the CARESS pilots will be the first users of the VCP Platform and will play an important role in the early life of the Community of Practice. After the piloting phase finishes (February 2018 approximately), the VCP Platform will be made available to the whole European home care community, thus starting a phase of growth and eventual self-sustainability. Exciting times ahead for care services for older people…

Stay tuned!!