Fighting Loneliness

Loneliness is a heterogenic problem. Many interventions have been developed to address loneliness. Due to the complexity of loneliness it is not easy for professionals to identify suitable interventions and to implement them. Professionals need to know which interventions can be implemented to alleviate loneliness, what their role is in implementing it and what the required skills are to carry it out.

Good practices in addressing loneliness among elderly will be exchanged between six European cities/countries (Nacka Sweden, Marseille France, Venice Italy, Crete Greece, Roeselare Belgium and Rotterdam the Netherlands), with the aim of improving the skills and competencies of students and professionals in the field of care and welfare. The good practices will be evaluated and discussed on the method used to alleviate loneliness, including the required roles of professionals to implement it and their necessary skills to carry it out in a consistent way. Each European city compiled a local expert group, containing education, municipality (policymakers), health- and/or social care organisation, and elderly.

1. To detect and share good practices in alleviating loneliness among elderly
2. To detect and share a bad (worst) case practice, to discover fail factors.
3. To evaluate the good practices regarding the content of the intervention, the required role of the professional to implement the intervention, their necessary skills to carry it out and critical elements that may influence the implementation of the intervention.
4. To exchange existing vocational training methods in each country.
5. To describe critical success and fail factors and critical elements for education, practice and (social) policy of cities/regions.