The GLIDE-19 (Erasmus +) project, targeted at health and social care professionals, aims to help them improve their awareness and knowledge of COVID-19 care, as well as their preparedness to deal with future health crises and pandemics. 

More specifically, GLIDE-19 aims at:

• Providing concrete solutions to provide current scientific background knowledge and increase the skills and competencies of health and social workers to cope with the symptoms of COVID-19. 

• Creating a vocational and educational training (VET) programme for healthcare workers that allows them to better adapt the training offered to the current situation of care systems, thus aligning with the evolution of economic cycles, working methods and key competencies required, for the benefit of COVID-19 patients.

Three co-creation sessions were held between October 2023 and May 2024 in Italy, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands to better understand the training needs of health and social care professionals concerning mental health prevention, treatment, rehabilitation and support in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and possible future pandemics.

Co-creation is a collective work methodology that considers the users of a design (in this case a training platform) as partners in the creation process. Co-creation believes in giving the public a more direct voice in the creation and design of innovative products, designed "with" and "by" people, rather than simply “for” them. Co-creation is an active dialogue, based on mutual learning and participation.

One of the tools of co-creation is Design Thinking, a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, question assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions for prototyping and testing. The success of Design Thinking lies in inviting different professions in order to understand what people want and need in their lives. The GLIDE-19 methodology follows this approach by collecting the needs of health and social care professionals to deal with crises such as COVID-19.

All the input and feedback gathered during the co-creation sessions has been used to develop the GLIDE-19 training course. In these sessions the different social professionals from the different countries were able to freely share their opinions, interests and needs. In June 2024 to September 2024 a pilot will be carried out to validate this training course in a larger group of (care)professionals.

For more information on the project: https://www.glide19.eu/