The 4-year KeepCaring project, launched on 1st July 2024, and co-funded under the Horizon Europe programme (Grant Agreement No 101137244) aims to (re-)build wellbeing and resilience of the healthcare workforce in hospital settings, to promote onboarding, as well as staying in the workplace, by co-creating a multi-faceted non-digital, digital and AI-supported solution package to prevent burnout among (aspirant) healthcare professionals on the individual, team, and organisational level.
The project goals are: identifying new factors that influence job resources, resilience and stress in (aspiring) healthcare professionals; empowering the hospital workforce (including students) in the surgical pathway by evaluating the (cost-) effectiveness of existing (digital) tools and by further augmenting these tools based on user insights; by supporting healthcare professionals and students in the dynamics of joint interaction in teams, to identify leadership styles and strategies (‘towards a safer and supportive working place’); supporting hospital organisations to understand what factors to consider – and how they are likely to play out- in making decisions for sustaining a healthy, inclusive and diversified workforce; and finally, developing, validating, and valorising a data-driven AI-prediction model to be embedded in an online Change Management Platform (CMP), able to forecast which interventions under which circumstances contribute towards a more resilient hospital working environment.
As partner in the project, the EFN will be involved in all the key work packages: WP2: Resilience Robustness 1 – Identification of factors related to resilience among health care professionals; WP3: Resilience Robustness 2 – Solutions and interventions to reduce job stress across clinical settings; WP4: Resilience Robustness 3 – Using co-work design to reduce burnout and increase work engagement; WP5: Resilience Robustness 4 – Change management in hospital organisations aiming to develop and interactive, web-based, responsive KEEPCARING Change Management Platform (CMP); and WP6: Dissemination, communication and maximising impact, aiming to raise awareness on the project attainments, disseminating them to the relevant audience, with a view to achieve their sustainability during and after the project.
The project consortium consists of 20 beneficiaries from 11 countries with a substantial and diverse pool of leaders representing stakeholders in the health sector at regional, national, and European levels. These include experts in (digital) interventions, organisational psychology, stress monitoring, and AI, as well as non-academic organisations representing medical specialists, nurses, and hospital managers.
Consortium: Amsterdam University Medical Centers (AMC), University of Limerick (UL), Nuromedia GmbH (NURO), Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), European Connected Health Alliance (ECHA), Chino Srl (CHINO), University of Warwick (UoW), Zealand University Denmark (RegioZ), Inland Norway University (INN), The National Research Council of Italy (CNR), University of Coimbra (UoC), University of Tartu (UoT), University of York (UoY), Healthy Mind (HM), NOVA University of Lisbon (NOVA), University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), The National Hospital of Denmark (RIGS), European Hospital and Healthcare Federation (HOPE), European Union of Medical Specialists (UEMS), European Federation of Nurses Associations (EFN).
