PROCAREFUL goes hybrid! In-presence activities have started

The project partners involved in the testing of the PROCAREFUL Model have recently launched in-person group activities by organising a workshop centred on the importance of physical exercise for fall prevention. Besides remote training and monitoring via the PROCAREFUL platform, in-presence activities are indeed crucial in the intention of ensuring the completeness of the model, which leverages the synthesis of traditional and remote care.  Therefore, in addition to on-to-one in presence support offered by professionals to participants, collective meeting moments represent a fundamental ingredient.

An equally core feature of the model is the holistic approach, according to which it is essential to act simultaneously and synergistically on the physical, cognitive and social dimensions to cultivate wellbeing. It is thus important that this aspect reaches older adults so that they can put in place behaviours and habits that can positively impact all of them.

For this reason, each of the workshops will be dedicated to exploring and deepening one of these dimensions, adopting an approach aimed at providing knowledge, but also practical recommendations for putting what has been learned into practice. Space is also reserved to exchange moving from personal experience. Indeed, sharing points of view, good or bad habits, and daily life episodes is meaningful precisely with the intention of adopting a concrete approach to these topics, so that they do not appear as an abstract set of notions, but something that can be progressively embedded into everyone’s routine.

IAT, project partner experienced in gerontology, participatory practices, and social learning, provided the others with guidelines for handling this first meeting. These guidelines integrate theoretical content with practical activities and methodological indications, specifically reserved for trainers.

Following the indications, the topic of fall prevention was dealt with in the five pilot sites by involving the participants through the collective reading of short informative texts, dedicating time for sharing experiences of falls, and performing all together the exercises for fall prevention proposed by the PROCAREFUL platform as part of the training programme. Of course, each partner has adopted these guidelines as a canvas while taking care to adapt them to its own local context, and participants’ characteristics and needs.

The workshop was a great success among the participants in the different pilots, who transversally appreciated the information discovered and discussed with trainers, and most of all the opportunity to share experiences among peers and have the occasion to socialise and spend time together.