New publication! The WELL CARE Guide to investing in care partnerships: working towards implementation

In the WELL CARE project, we join forces as researchers, advocacy partners and other stakeholders at the European, national, and local level – together working to improve the mental wellbeing and resilience of informal carers and long-term care workers. We develop and promote care partnerships that aim to improve the coordination, integration, and mutual recognition of care and caring activities performed by these two groups of caregivers. But what do we mean by care partnership, and how can these benefit caregivers’ wellbeing? And what practical steps can we take to promote, develop and implement such care partnerships? These and other questions are addressed in our recent publication: ‘The WELL CARE Guide to investing in care partnerships: working towards implementation’.

The WELL CARE Guide is written to support researchers, advocacy partners and other stakeholders – within and beyond WELL CARE project – in developing, promoting, implementing and evaluation of care partnership practices. By providing a range of resources and references, it aims to bridge theory and practice in a way that is both instructional and inspirational. While we definitely do not aspire to provide an exhaustive ‘methods book’ or a clear-cut ‘blueprint’, we do hope that this Guide allows partners – and the stakeholders they engage with – to benefit from the lessons learned by those who have gone before us.

Within the vast range of methods, tools and strategies that are available across the various academic, policy and practice communities, it can be hard to pinpoint those resources that are most helpful to reach your objectives. Or you may not know what to look for in the first place. This Guide will help partners to identify areas and issues that may (or that definitely do) require their attention when investing in supportive care partnerships. It highlights risks and opportunities from the scoping stage until the final evaluation, while also signposting partners to relevant resources, tools and methods that will help to practically address these issues.

The Guide consists of five main sections that can be read separately, making sure that the publication can be used as a reference book on different themes and in different phases of the pursuit of care partnerships. The initial section lays out how the WELL CARE project approaches the translation, promotion, and evaluation of good practices by learning from existing practices elsewhere. After that, it unpacks the notion of care partnerships by providing more clarity with regards to the various roles, relationships and dynamics that constitute such partnerships. After that, subsequent sections provide partners and stakeholders with practical guidance for collaboratively determining the focus and scope of their joint activities, for working towards the actual development and implementation of care partnership practices, and for evaluating and learning from these activities.

Within each section the Guide links to external resources for further reading – which can be both theoretical, practical, or methodological. We hope that by providing such links, the various users of the Guide will be signposted to those resources suiting their particular needs or interests. The various links to such resources are organized in boxes (‘Tools and resources’) throughout the publication. Moreover, other boxes provide more detailed explanations of a particular concept, approach or phenomenon (‘In focus’), illustrative and practical examples (‘Case examples’), and additional guidance on various project activities or processes (‘Project support’).

For questions or comments on the WELL CARE Guide, feel free to get in touch with Ludo Glimmerveen at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (L.M.Glimmerveen@vu.nl).

Read the WELL CARE Guide to investing in care partnerships: working towards implementation