FEEL GOOD Strategic Relationship competences for Heathcare Professionals can be a tool to improve the reciprocal recognition of qualifications and thus help people to exercise their right to mobility without losing their competences and experience. FEEL GOOD, through its participatory and co-planning approach, focuses on a simple but significant aspect: positive relationships. The different professions and roles involved in the health and social care sector often have excellent technical knowledge but not always good interpersonal competences: this mismatching causing a lot of problems for the final beneficiaries: patients, visitors, family members. At the same time these factors make the process longer and more expensive both in terms of subjective well-being and budget. FEEL GOOD intends to intervene in those areas of competencies potentially able to integrate themselves with training and update paths of any professional involved in the health and social care sector- from the physician to the in-home caregiver, the health and social care worker and the nurse.The main objective of project activities will be to provide a concrete response by developing Learning Unit on relationship competences for heath and social care professionals . Feel Good wants to give evidence and substance to the hidden curriculum, turning these competences into training tools, usable and transferable to many different contexts. The project objective is to build and share a method for the self-evaluation of effective soft skills, beginning from the enhancement of both professionals and beneficiaries experiences. Through connecting stories, sharing meanings, and recognising the other, FEEL GOOD develop new contents starting from real contexts that are able to explore the complexity of subjective and objective elements influencing them. Issues such as multiculturalism, empathy, recognition of the other, and listening are central elements if they are not treated in a general manner but they are rather included in situations where pain and expectations, fatigue and fear have a significant impact. Feel Good Learning Unit will be able to address different recipients, and therefore they can be used in a variety of educational situations: vocational training, higher education, continuing education. Partners of the four countries represent different views and areas of expertise, from training to services to patients and social services in a broad sense. This will actually make the project activities able to gather different points of view and enhance different approaches in order to develop an innovative training system. Medical Humanities is the approach chosen by Feel Good to encourage the development of cross-curricular and strategic skills and development of reflective and meta-reflective competences. The Applicant Community Capodarco Rome, has a long experience on the national level regarding training and placement of health workers; it has monitored and analyzed the changes involving these professionalities and identified from time to time new emerging needs. The increasingly urgent demand for new relationships competences, along with the growing international mobility of these people has led to the construction of a multidimensional partnership who could be a coherent group from 4 partner country: BFI OÖ (AT), IASIS (GR), Docete Omnes Foundation (ES), People (IT), one Associated Partner FEAPS (ES). Through the active involvement of 240 professionals, 320 people beneficiary of health and social services (with main attention to elderly and migrants), 180 stakeholders and key actors involved in Feel Good Multiplier events, the partnership will be able to realize two original reports EMPOWERMENT OF EUROPEAN HEALTHCARE OPERATORS, and SOCIAL VISION OF HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALITIES. The Intellectual Output FEEL GOOD Training model: RELATIONSHIP COMPETENCES FOR HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS, will gain strength and consistency thanks peer review activities, pilot testing in each country partner, Multiplier Events and dissemination and communication activities. From start to finish, the project will always make a lot of attention to involve people and their experiences to enhance them, co-designing the actions and co-evaluate the results. Great attention is also paid to the involvement of relevant stakeholders and policy maker to whom will be addressed a specific document ?policy Raccomandation' to better integrate different training system in a EU level. To support the project, a web platform will be set up; this will help interacting with the different targets during FEEL GOOD life-cycle, and it will continue to multiply and spread outputs over the long term, going on to keep alive the debate about the topic of training between all partners and stakeholders involved. In this way FEEL GOOD want to guarantee to those who will participate in its implementation to promote an 'instrument' able playing well.
FEEL GOOD project originates from the emerging need of the social and healthcare sector to have professionals equipped with a baggage of relational competences capable of enhancing the “care” of patients through positive relationships. Nowadays, having good scientific knowledge and technical skills is not enough. Healthcare professionals should put the beneficiaries at the centre of their action, considering the uniqueness and dignity of each individual and be allowed to become emotionally involved. From this perspective, a paradigm shift is needed in the healthcare sector towards the approach of Medical Humanities (MH). This approach responds to a stronger and stronger trend in medicine to separate technical protocols from human events. The use of MH aims at training ad hoc attitudes and behaviors to realize the so‐called “humanistic medicine”, which deals with developing communicative and relational skills, empathic attitudes, interpretative skills and self‐care. The objective of the project is to improve the relationship competences of healthcare professionals when working with users of healthcare/patients. In particular, the project aims at: i) increasing healthcare professionals’ awareness about issues such as multiculturalism, empathy and active listening; ii) enhancing healthcare professionals’ knowledge regarding Medical Humanities and application of its principles in their daily practice, iii) assisting self-evaluation and self-reflection processes regarding soft skills of healthcare professionals and beneficiaries; iv) highlight the importance of hidden curriculum regarding health care professionals’ education. FEEL GOOD was implemented over a period of 30 months by a consortium of five partners led by Comunità Capodarco di Roma. The partnership brought together different views and areas of expertise. BFI OO is one of the biggest adult education centers in Austria and its longstanding experience in vocational training, its strong focus on the care of elderly, and its extensive network and participation to European projects was extremely helpful and enriching for the quality of the project results. IASIS, FDO and Comunità Capodarco also boast solid experience in social services in the broad sense and vocational training with vulnerable groups, especially people with disabilities, psychiatric diseases, and migrants. and minors neglected. People Aps. contributed substantially with its skills in the field of research, counselling, competence mapping and coaching paths for empowerment. The project involved a range of participants: from social and healthcare professionals to students of healthcare professions, from stakeholders in the sector (VET organizations, public health hospitals, private service providers, policy makers) to beneficiaries of healthcare services and their family members. This was facilitated by the connections and the daily work of partners with these groups. The project “physically” involved in FeelGood planned activities approximately 1000 people, and many more were reached through dissemination activities of the project’s objectives and outputs. FEEL GOOD implementation unfolded through four stages: the development of three intellectual outputs and one transversal phase dedicated to communication and dissemination throughout project lifetime. The first Intellectual Output (IO1) “Empowerment of European healthcare operators” is the product of the comparison of four national research undertaken with the aim of mapping the needs and areas of strategic competencies that can enhance the relationship between health and social care providers and users, as emerged from surveys with professionals and key actors of the sector. From another perspective, the aim of second Intellectual Output (IO2) “Social vision of healthcare professionals” was to collect information on the correct understanding of the needs of final beneficiaries, how to prevent inappropriate and harmful behavior of healthcare professionals and how to improve the organization of services in terms of cost-effectiveness. Building on IO1 and IO2 results, the partnership through a participatory approach of co-evaluation, piloting and peer-review, defined and finalized the structure and content of the third and last Intellectual Output (IO3) “Training Model relationship competences for healthcare professionals” composed by three Learning Units and seven Modules of 6 hours each. This training product addresses different targets and is transferable to many contexts as it can be used in a variety of educational situations: vocational training, higher education, lifelong education. It was officially presented at the Final Conference held in Rome at the regional-level authority Regione Lazio, and raised the interest of several stakeholders, including VET providers and healthcare facilities, who showed the desire to adopt the Training Model for their services or personnel.