Most older people in the European Region prefer to have cared at home towards the end of life (Journal of Palliative Medicine, 2000, 3: 287–300). This preference, however, remains still largely unmet. Despite efforts in some countries to improve opportunities for people to die at home, the historical trend toward the hospitalization of death continues, and most older people in Europe die in hospitals or in long-term care facilities (http://www.euro.who.int/InformationSources/Publications/Catalogue/20050118_1, accessed 1 December 2010) The European Association for Palliative Care and the International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care joined forces with other regional and academic organizations to initiate a global palliative care research initiative with a special focus on low- and medium-income countries. Many organizations have signed the Declaration of Venice: Palliative Care Research in Developing Countries to support this initiative, and the EU has funded major programmes to foster research collaboration across Europe (http://www.compasscollaborative.com). Promote and invest in developing palliative care skills among staff working across all settings. Ensure that the training of health care professionals includes sufficient time devoted to palliative medicine, geriatric medicine, geriatric nursing and mental health services for older people and that professionals are supported in keeping up to date. Main objectives of the project: -Training of adults who serve palliative care, - Education of patients' relatives who have to look after their patients, -Renewing their knowledge in the context of lifelong learning principles of those who do this work in hospices. -To facilitate the business life of people who want to do this job, Methodology: -The kick-off and final transnational meetings of the project will be held in Turkey. Each partner will hold one transnational meeting at their countries. In addition to those meetings, skype meetings will be held among partners periodically. -Intellectual outputs will be reviewed at each meeting. -All documents will be uploaded to the cloud system. Each partner will upload their own documents to the cloud and will be able to access any document. -Each intellectual output will have a lead partner. Output leaders will be chosen according to their expertise in the subject of the output. -All partners will contribute to each intellectual output. During the preparation of the outputs, the target group will always be considered. The language of educational materials will be clear and understandable. Therefore, medical terms will be avoided. Videos will not be too long and boring. -For communication tools, E-mail, WhatsApp, Skype, the phone will be used. A digital platform will be established for open and distance education to be provided at the KLU Continuing Education Center. This platform will serve as a new generation online virtual meeting and distance learning tool. Trainers and the target group will be able to connect to the platform from any location where the Internet is available. They will be able to connect from their smartphones as well. In this platform, virtual meetings can be held, perform open and distance education in virtual classrooms, share the educational contents or presentations. They will be able to focus on the main content and work. Developed educational materials for the virtual classes will make the training for low skill-adults more fun. The educators will be able to create virtual meeting rooms on the digital platform and help trainees individually. Through the internet via the digital platform; - Communicate with the participants in voice, text and video. - Share documents, - Give open and distance education, - Quickly share presentations, - Contact with adult trainees in a short time, - Make presentations more functional more effective, - Trainees will be able to record the provided lesson for re-use, - Can share the computer screen or draw it for explanations, - Form a questionnaire or participate in the survey, - Organize activities such as meetings, seminars and conferences with trainees. - Training contents can be easily published, created virtual classes, and trainees' performances can be monitored continuously regardless of time and place. Number and Profile of Participants: The number of participants in the pilot course will be determined. The virtual class size will be maximum 15 in the pilot program. Multiplier events will be determined by the number of participants. 50 people will be surveyed in each country. The target group of the questionnaires will be adults, palliative patients, patient relatives and the elderly people. A total of 250 people will be surveyed. The analysis of these surveys will be carried out by APEC.
Informal carers were central to the achievement of end of life care as they provide a substantial, yet hidden contribution to our local economy. This entails considerable personal cost to carers, and it is recognised that their needs should be assessed and addressed. Main objectives of the project were: -Training of adults who serve palliative care, - Renewing their knowledge in the context of lifelong learning principles of those who do this work in hospices. - To facilitate the business life of people who want to do this job, - Training of palliative care professionals, -Training of palliative care family caregivers, - Awareness raising of palliative care in our country and of the need to be trained also as family caregivers - Contribute to developing an interdisciplinary adult education programme. Also we aimed; to train the nurses on the proper ways to care about their patients to give the unprofessional caregivers a great tool to learn everything what they need to know to take good care of their relatives to remind the professional nurses with years of practice, how to do the tasks that often done automatically and how to do them better raise the quality of life of palliative patients
Firstly it was the need of family caregivers for more regular and reliable palliative education programs. At the same time, in the frame of the project we determined the current situation of palliative informal caregivers and tried to identify the gap between real and required levels of knowledge, skills and competences of the caregivers and relatives of palliative patients. We have identified the training needs of caregivers and relatives of palliative patients and explored palliative care education to enhance informal caregiver skills in caring for palliative patients. The project gave us the opportunity to work in the field of assistance to vulnerable people with special health conditions (especially seniors) and with their caregivers, who are relevant target groups of our activities. It also offers the opportunity for training for possible employability of our users. The project results also provides a great opportunity to improve the quality of palliative care, to raise awareness about the most important topics and to spread the knowledge and good practices among both professionals or nursing students and low-skilled caregivers who do not have the proper training to care their close ones.