BU joint project to improve dignified care and quality of life for older people
€4.5 million has been granted to the INNOVATEDIGNITY project, by the European Commission, to educate the next generation of leaders to improve the quality of life and provide dignified sustainable care for older people, including new care models and digital applications.
The project will be run by a research team of experts in nursing from a number of institutions across the UK and Europe, including Professor Ann Hemingway, Professor of Public Health and Wellbeing at Bournemouth University.
“It’s important to develop new innovations in dignified sustainable care, especially due to its increasing need as people are living longer,” says Professor Hemingway. “To date, we mostly only recognise this type of care when it’s missing, which is why it’s so important for us to work with people who need care through the INNOVATEDIGNITY project. Their views will help us to underpin future caring practices.”
The research will examine older peoples' perspectives of care systems (focusing on dignity), investigating the potential for digital innovation that is person-centred and exploration of gender issues in care to provide crucial, urgently needed knowledge for sustainable and fit-for-purpose care that supports the quality of life for older people.”
Project Lead, Professor Kathleen Galvin, said: “Our aim is to address the European problem of how ageing people can live well within caring systems with a concentration on cross-disciplinary scholarship, producing an evidence base through 15 PhD investigations.
“Bournemouth University will be contributing to the supervision of these 15 PhD students to generate testable theories on what constitutes dignified innovative sustainable care through cross country comparisons, as well as offering specialist research training to all the PhD students,” explains Professor Hemingway.
“The outcomes of this project will be theories, models and policy and practice based research the impact of which will be to enable policy makers, professionals and those they care for to develop and provide dignified innovative sustainable care for future generations.”
