GAPET

Sweden

01-12-2009

The service aims to reduce informal carers’ social isolation through the creation of a community of peer support and by providing access to a professional contact person.

 

The service intends to improve informal carers’ quality of life by means of a secure electronic meeting place tailored to their individual needs. The main goal is to significantly support informal carers in order to foster ageing and employment policies of active, efficient, and relieved formal carers.

 

 Care Recipients
 Informal carers
 Paid assistants
 Formal carers

Not available

 Independent Living
 Information and learning for carers
 Personal Support and Social Integration for carer
 Care coordination

Support quality of care by informing and supporting informal carers through:

• log-in details to the online national network from a formal carer within the municipality or health care sector;
• news updates, a collection of internet links and literature lists.
• forum groups

A personal computer, a smartphone or a tablet connected to the internet.

 

Both public and private

Public service funding: Government, Regional, Local Authorities, non-profit public entities

Local authorities

Other: please specify

Private citizens setting up and running the service.

 

A) Trading practices: T

There are no costs for informal carers as the service is financed by municipalities, which pay a yearly subscription according to a sliding scale based on the number of inhabitants. For example, for a municipality with 100,000 inhabitants, the yearly cost would be 10,200 €, while for a municipality with 25,000 inhabitants, the yearly cost would be 4,700 €.

B) Operational processes:

No training as such is provided to users by the company staff as the carers’ advisor or co-ordinator in the municipality contacts the informal carers in order to deal with their queries, etc.

 

No major barriers or problems have been documented on the development and the adoption of the initiative. Initially, the focus was on disseminating information about the service to market it as widely as possible. This was a challenge given that the service is run by a small number of individuals. However, thanks to the owners’ in-depth knowledge, the initiative was created and developed despite the lack of any external private funding to date. Notwithstanding this last point, prospects for development are positive as new municipalities are regularly joining, therefore GAPET is expecting an increase in the number of its target users.

 

€ 0 - 10,000

Not available

 Authorities
 Private Care Sector
 Health and Social Care Systems
 Third Sector
 Private Companies

Not available

Not involved

 Informal Carers
 Health Professionals
 Social Care Professionals
 Privately-Hired Care Assistants (inc. Migrant Care Workers)
 Volunteers

GAPET was devised by two persons with their own private funds. Maria's father got the Alzheimer disease at a young age and she has bought been engaged in building national networks for young carers and has professionally been working as operations manager of two residents for dementia patients. Maria has also been working as a project manager helping a municipality to introduce the “breakthrough-method”. Gustaf has a degree in designing and building personalised web communication platforms.

 

Not involved

1,001 - 5,000

2.950 users at the end of 2013.

 

The main promotion channel is the service website.

 

The service may positively affect:

- Care recipients, as it can improve the relationship between carers and cared for persons: the last can feel more relaxed and the first more accepted.

- Informal carers, as it may help to reconcile care and work and to improve their social life and health.

- Paid assistants, as it may help to improve their social life and health (Cavalli, 2013).

 

The service can positively affect:

- Private organisations that provide care, as it could help to save costs and optimize resources

- Companies and the labour market, as it could help the informal carer to reconcile paid work and caring tasks thereby avoiding added costs of replacing the worker who has to stay at home with the care recipient (Cavalli, 2013)

 

Even if there is not an impact assessment of the initiative, we can argue that it could benefit the public authorities, the Swedish NHS and social services, as it could help to save the costs of home caring and hospitalisation and it could be effective in informing, supporting and relieving informal carers and qualifying formal carers performance, optimising financial and human resources (Cavalli, 2013).

 

Strengths:

1. No special installation or configuration is needed to start using GAPET, so users can access the service from any computer / smartphone / tablet with an Internet connection. A great deal of emphasis has been placed on the security of the network.

2. The strength of GAPET is that the care system does not need to be adapted as it can easily be incorporated within the work of the carer adviser service.

Weaknesses:

1. The service is particularly geared towards younger and middle-aged informal carers, but the 10% of the users are over 75)

2. Another weakness is the absence of an English language webpage, which reduces the initiative’s transferability.

3. The lack of training courses for computer illiterate

4. The lack of impact assessment.

Opportunities:

1. A constant challenge to all carer support services is that providers in the municipality need to be aware of the existence of informal carers in order to actively and successfully recruit them. Likewise, informal carers have to know about the existence of the service. This is a clear opportunity, according to existing empirical data, since working carers, a key target group, are often difficult to reach.

Threats:

1. As no service evaluation is available, the only threat appears to be the capacity to make the service known among informal carers.

 

The service can easily be scaled up, and in theory, offered to all carers in the municipality, as there is no limit to the number of users.

No formal evaluation has been conducted. However, an 'idea box' together with regular verbal and written feedback from users (carers and staff) about the service, has led to approximately 50 improvements to the service since its start in December 2009. Thus, there are good chances to increase the number of users since at present, the service has a limited local and regional coverage.

 

References:

Cavalli G. (2013), Gapet coordinator, case-study's updating via personal communication.

Resources:

http://www.gapet.se/

 

 

Gustaf Cavalli
Telephone: 0046 0705-192652
E-mail: gustaf.cavalli@gapet.se

Address:

Edu Med AB

Sommarstugevägen 6

SE-263 71 Jonstorp

Sweden