The WELL CARE project will seek to understand individual, contextual and organisational mechanisms behind the success of solutions for primary, secondary and tertiary prevention of mental health issues among LTC workers and/or informal carers. The ultimate goal is to develop a set of solution prototypes (see definition in the next box), each able to address the mental health needs of both LTC workers and informal carers, thus sustaining and enabling a vision of care partnerships between these two (internally heterogeneous) groups. By care partnership we mean the coordination, integration, and mutual recognition of care and caring activities performed by LTC workers and informal carers, in a vision of integrated LTC (European Care Strategy, COM/2022/440, WHO, 2022).

A ‘good practice’ is defined as a set of strategies, approaches and/or activities that have been shown through research and evaluation to be effective, efficient, sustainable and/or transferable, and to reliably lead to a desired result (EC 2021c). In the context of WELL CARE, we will look at good practices of innovative solutions improving resilience and mental wellbeing of LTC workers and/or informal carers. We use the expression ‘innovative solution’ to refer to any strategy, approach and/or activity put in place by LTC providers, informal carers’ organisations, employers or other local/national stakeholders in order to support the above-mentioned mental health outcomes in an innovative way (i.e. beyond established state-of-the-art). An innovative solution can vary in its nature (e.g., regulatory, organisational, technological, educational, human resource management, health service). We also use the terms ‘prototype’ or ‘solution prototype’ (interchangeably) by referring to decontextualized-yet-concrete models of innovative solutions for LTC workers and informal carers. Such models will be built through an inductive research and design process based on the good practices identified in WP2 (see also more details on prototypes under the 1.2 Methodology section and WP3 description). Ideally, solution prototypes should stimulate care partnerships between LTC workers and informal carers by addressing mental health needs of both groups (even though it cannot be excluded that some solution prototypes could be focused “only” on informal carers or LTC workers, depending on how the underlying mechanisms and drivers work and can be combined).

(Personal) resilience, community resilience and mental wellbeing Both resilience and mental wellbeing refer to psychological states of an individual. By (personal) resilience, we refer to “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioural flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands” (APA 2023). Community resilience is the ability of a community to use its assets to strengthen public health and healthcare systems and to improve the community’s physical, behavioural, and social health to withstand, adapt to, and recover from adversity (US PHE 2015). By mental wellbeing, we mean “a state of wellbeing in which the individual realises his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.” (WHO 2023)

The term ‘ecosystem’ is used in WELL CARE to refer to a dynamic network of interrelated actors and organisations, including care providers and professional networks, informal carers, employers, patients, funders, local governments, regulatory agencies, and others) within the local, regional and/or national settings in which implementation (within and/or beyond the project timeframe) takes place (Dessers & Mohr 2019).