The number of people suffering from dementia and needing care is constantly increasing. In many countries in Europe, this challenge is combined with the challenge of handling multi-culturality and multi-ethnicity amongst care staff, the residents at care homes and the elderly receiving home care - and amongst the relatives of these.

Care work is stressful and managing different value systems based on different cultural backgrounds can be very complex. In care work, the caregiver gets very close to the person in need of care, personal barriers are broken down and the caregiver enters the intimate sphere of the patient/older person. It is important that the education and training for caregivers provides them with relevant and up-to-date knowledge, skills and attitudes in order to prepare them for these challenges in a positive and responsive way.

In spite of the obvious need, unfortunately, in the existing basic education and training, neither handling multicultural relations nor dementia are given high priority.

Building on the work of the I-CARE project, our partner SOSU Ostjylland has recently been successful in securing additional funds to focus on the particular aspect of multi-ethnicity and Dementia through another ERASMUS+ project - “AMIDE - Approaching Multi-ethnicity and Dementia in Education and Work".

See the project website here:  https://amide.eu/

The objective of the AMIDE project is to contribute to the improvement of competences amongst teachers and trainers who are educating and training basic care staff, and to the improvement of competences among professional caregivers with regard to multi-ethnicity/multi-culturality and dementia. The 8 project partners are from Denmark, Germany, Italy and Latvia. The project continues until 2022.

There are clear synergies between the two projects – the work of both the I-CARE and AMIDE projects are complimentary and designed to have significant impact on the Social and Healthcare sector.