The “Health Care Clown Pathways” project is a Strategic Partnership supporting the innovation in the Educational and Vocational Training Sector (VET). This project has been created for the importance of the professional role of the Healthcare Clown professional in the performing arts, aimed at assist and relieve the patients’ anxiety and fear, especially children and elders, in the healthcare institutions and social care services. This awareness has origin from experiences at European level, which demonstrate that the Healthcare Clown fosters the humanization process in the healthcare environment. Meanwhile, in different European countries, with the only exception of the France thanks to Le Rire Médecin, project’s partner, the training for the Healthcare Clown is not regulated, as it does not exist as formal qualified profession. This project has born to provide for this gap in the training sector. The partnership is composed of Soccorso Clown Onlus (Italy) as Applicant, Fondazione Spazio Reale (Italy), Le Rire Médecin (France), Dr. Klauns (Latvia), Sykehusklovnene (Norway) and Universidade do Minho (Portugal). Its transnational dimension is represented by the fact that the organizations already work together in the EFCHO context, which is also a project’s supporter, to qualify and to regulate the professional role of the Healthcare Clown. Also the researchers’ role of the University of Minho will be fundamental, since for several years they carry out studies in this sector and they are members of H-CRIN+, Healthcare Clowning Research International Network, that is also a supporter of the project. The project has the following objectives: - Designing, realizing, testing and validating an innovative training proposal, aimed at defining the competences requested to work as Healthcare Clown in a sharing and transferable manner at European level; - Proposing the European level training standards to obtain the qualified profession as Healthcare Clown, referring to ECVET and EQF Systems. These objectives will be achieved through the following results: - European guidelines that include the definition of the profession of the Healthcare Clown, in terms of key competences and profession qualification according to the standard of the ECVET system (European Credit System for Vocational Education and Training) and EQF system (European Qualifications Framework). - Methodological Framework for design and implementation of the training formal pathway, transferable at European level to achieve the Professional Qualification of Healthcare Clown, professional in the performing arts, on the basis on the EQF and ECVET Systems. - Experimentation of some formal pathways in Italy, Latvia, Norway. The objective of this pilot courses consists in testing the course’s structure, the training objectives, the organization facilities, the training methods, the didactic materials with the aim of a final validation. - Digital Resources Centre. It will be a web platform that will make available and accessible the results of the intellectual output, the pilot courses realized, studies and researches, tools and methods, didactic materials, audio recording and video (videos, interviews, multimedia resources) of the activities carried out, on the basis of OER (Open Educational Resources). The beneficiaries will be adults, with marked comic talent, eclectic actors coming from different theatrical backgrounds, who have experience in working with children and adults.
The objectives intended to be achieved with the implementation of the HEALTH CARE CLOWN PATHWAYS project were: - the design and implementation of an innovative training proposal, through the creation of Guidelines with the definition of the profession of the Healthcare Clown in terms of indicating key competencies and professional qualification. - the creation of the Methodological Framework for the design and implementation of a formal learning pathway, transferable at the European level for obtaining the Professional Qualification of Healthcare Clown Professional Performing Arts according to the standards of the European Credit System for Vocational Education and Training (ECVET) and the European Qualifications Framework (EQF) system of the EQF and ECVET system. - testing and validating the course structure and training objectives and methodologies in Italy, Norway and Latvia. - making the results of the project accessible with the implementation of a web platform https://www.erasmushccp.eu (Digital Resource Centre) according to the principle of OER (Open Educational Resources).
The HEALTH CARE CLOWN PATHWAYS is a transnational project, co-financed by the Erasmus+ Program of the European Commission. The consortium of this project was composed of Soccorso Clown Onlus (as the Principal Coordinator, Italy), Spazio Reale (Italy), Le Rire Médecin (France), Dr. Klauns (Latvia), Sykehusklovnene (Norway), and ISCTE–University Institute of Lisbon (Portugal). The project has been developed because of the emerging importance of the role of Healthcare Clown professional performing artists in healthcare institutions on the European level, aimed at alleviating the anxiety and fears of patients, especially children and the elderly and fostering the process and quality of the humanization of health care settings. The professional figure of the healthcare clown was increasingly present in healthcare settings, and it needed a clear and common definition in terms of skills and professional qualification, which could be shared and transferred at the European level. The project was therefore created to make up for this lack of training standards on the European level in order to obtain the professional qualification of Healthcare Clown according to the ECVET and EQF System.