Mental well-being of people with dementia - market analysis of extra-curricular education in nursing homes/home-care agencies in field of dementia

Desired outcome

Market analysis of the social care for elderly in one or more EU countries:

- collect what type (nursing homes, home care, special housing...) and how many elderly care institutions are there in the individual country

- characteristics of the long-term care in country (who can get it, in what extent, what services are offered to the elderly)

- what is the education type and level you need to take care of elderly (healthy or sick), if you need any

- what are the institutions that are giving you education about how to take care of elderly (university or other type of education)

- for what type of additional education for their employees (carers, medical staff) do social care institutions (nursing homes, home care agencies) pay for/offer/demand for their employees

- is there enough budget to cover extra education for employees? If not, how then they decide which educational contents are priority?

- do social care institutions (nursing homes, home care agencies) for elderly miss some kind of extra aducation on the market?

- try to find best educational programmes in any kind of educational institutions (public or private ones) that are adressing mental health of people with dementia or cognitive activation of people with dementia

- is there an organization or company or governmental organization which provides a list of care givers for home care, if yes, what are those?

- check percentage of population who has dementia, how many of these receive institutional help, how many of these are being taken care at home. Is there any support for family members to become care giver for people with dementia?

Initial Problem Description

Our company is providing online educational courses about mental well being of people with dementia - courses teach family members and professional carers (nursing home staff, home care carers, companions...) on how to lead and efficient communication with people with dementia to lower their level of chaotic feelings, on how to lead meaningful conversations with them, on how to engage them successfully in different free time and daily activities.

Our company will be addressing B2B and B2C market with courses, but we need an anlysis of social care system in individual EU countries, so we can be targeting B2B customers/market (nursing homes, agencies, governmental bodies, educational institutions...) in the most proper way.

Context

Nursing homes: staff in nursing homes does not have any special knowledge about dementia and howthe know how on how they should approach people with dementia, so that these people will feel calmer, less confused, more time and space oriented, engaged and happy. Today people with dementia are put aside, they are not well understood - carers think they are not capable to do many stuff any more and that efficient communication with them (which would drastcally lower their challenging behaviour) is impossible (which is not true). Maybe the most of the knowledge carers receive are just the factual data about dementia, but they dont get any really practical advices and guidelines on how to efficiently address the true well being of people with dementia.

Home care staff: Home care agencies are facing similar challenges then described with nursing homes. Dementia is newer desease, which is very challenging to handle for people who has it as for carers, so know how on how to take care of mental well-being of these people is just not developed so much yet - and what is especially the case, there have been developed very good and efficient methods which can efficiently help people with dementia in increasing their well-being, but they are not distributed efficiently (they dont reach many users).

We think we can be very good intermediary who will bring this know how to many professional carers, but we need to have good overview of the social care system for elderly in individual country, so we can efficiently address the market.

Connection to cross-cutting areas

Digitalisation: we are/will be offering our courses online (in own online store) and we will also develop a complex platform in the future which will offer customized guiding for the customers through the range of our courses according to their needs - also AI will be included after certain time):

1. AI will analyze user behavior to curate personalized content, which could make the caregiving experience more user-specific. Whether someone is caring for a loved one with early-stage dementia or advanced dementia, AI can ensure the information they see is most relevant to their situation.
2. AI could predict user needs based on their interactions and preemptively provide them with the resources they require. For example, if the caregiver often searches for "communicating with a dementia patient," the system might suggest a course on effective communication techniques in dementia care.

Input

WHO and different EU reports about social care systems and expert papers on how future of social care for elderly should look like. But we want to see different and more accurate data/info then we can reach on google or as somebody who does not live in certain EU country in question. We hope students can connect with real experts from social care system in country, do interviews with them or/and search for data whereever they know they can find really relevant data we are looking for.

Expectations

I will be happy if we together, via zooms come to other solutions/opportunities, which we can not think about yet right now.

Probably the solution should bring us insights which we couldn´t have reached without the help of locals (students, experts, professors). We look for an in depth analysis of the market which we described into detail above.

Desired Team Profile

Academia background: Social care education, social gerontology, psychology ....

Skills: innovative, motivated students who have a strong desire to work and do a research in social care of elderly, students who are self driven and are already focused on new and innovative models of social care for elderly, are constantly looking for best practices in this area and are maybe already familiar with montessori method for elderly, cognitive stimulation therapy for elderly, companionship ....

Additional Information

The EU and Global Coalition on Aging (GCOA) calls for the creation of relationship-based care, which prioritizes long-term relationships between elderly care recipients and non-family caregivers. Currently, the area of soft skills (helping to improve mental well being of elderly/people with dementia) in social care is hardly addressed in educational curricula at all levels of education. Additionally, family members caring for an elderly person don´t receive any education at all in this area. It is therefore urgent to ensure quality education in this area, both for formal and informal carers.

Our competition currently consists of online courses offered mainly by: universities, expert institutions for dementia (like US Center for Applied Research in Dementia), online learning platforms, consultants which are focused on:

- the care for people with dementia
- Montessori method for elderly and people with dementia

There are no courses where the important focus would be on social needs of elderly (mental well-being: companion care, independence) and where it would be showed how to address these needs very practically

Disadvantages of competitive online courses:

- they do not allow quality content consumption: most often lecturers are not skilled in presenting content in online trainings (online course design demands expert knowledge to be built in an appealing way for consumers – so that the content of the course attracts their attention and “force” them to finish the course)

- they are not mass advertised in order to reach interested public: creators of the courses are mainly universities and expert institutions which are not very commercially oriented – they don’t have staff neither knowledge how to perform marketing activities

- courses cover very weakly social needs of elderly (companion care, independence)

Related Keywords

• Digitalization
• Medical Health related
• Other Medical/Health Related