Family carers (or informal caregivers) are an essential component of the health and long-term care system in many European countries. They provide unpaid support to an ageing, chronically ill or disabled relative, usually in the home environment of the person. An especially heavy burden is falling on women who provide about two thirds of informal care. They are facing great challenges as they often have to combine caregiving responsibilities, career and personal life which may result in a lack of privacy, professional growth and free time. In order to meet their multiple roles they are likely to reduce work hours or give up work entirely. After the caring period, the re-integration into the labour market turns out to be difficult as support for the transition is missing.

The Care4Carer project wants to fill this gap of support through the development of an innovative and interactive support programme designed to address informal carers’ specific needs.

Care4Carers aims to develop individually tailored counselling offers for family carers to

producing innovative counselling guidelines for adult educators and counselling staff working with family carers and an interactive e-learning platform targeted at family carers with a variety of learning material, tools and networking possibilities. This will be made possible by the following project results:

Our support offers will be individually tailored to the needs of family carers according to their different time resources and life situations.