Caring stories

We aim to make people’s experiences – and the stories about these experiences – the core of how we organize, provide and make decisions about care and cure.

In particular, stories help us to make decisions that are close to the hearts of patients and those who are close to them. Stories facilitate person-centred care, which enhances patient engagement, promotes reciprocity in the care relationship and enables communication between different disciplines. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and how we situate our experiences. We invite you to make patients’ stories the stories we care about.

In this project, we aim to collect short stories (experiences) from older adults and those who support them (both professionally and those who are close to them) during the COVID-19 crisis. We ask these individuals to share their experiences: What was something memorable? What was a significant everyday experience? The collected stories will be used anonymously to understand and help improve care practices in relation to COVID-19. These anonymous stories will also be used to train (future) healthcare professionals, allowing them to listen to and learn from the actual voices in care.

We invite you to share your short story by finding the country where you live on the top menu. You can share one experience in each story. You may share one story or several stories. Stories may change. Stories can be selective. Stories prioritize. Stories contradict. This is exactly why they matter: They indicate what is important in someone's life and help us to better understand each other. In understanding people’s stories about care, we can learn how we can contribute to their enjoyment of life by caring.

Our team consists of a diverse group of people from six different countries. Our partners are: University of Barcelona, University of Newcastle, University of Durham, Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing, University of Copenhagen, E-Seniors, Consorzio Arca, Erasmus University and Zilveren Kruis/Achmea.

We collect your stories through Sensemaker®. Through a website available in any browser or an app downloadable on your smartphone, you can share your story in an open field. After this, you will be asked several questions (both closed and open). Your answers to these questions allow us to see patterns in the stories and to answer research questions such as: What matters to people in Spain? How did they experience care during COVID-19? How was this different for people in the Netherlands or Denmark or Italy? How did healthcare professionals, patients or others experience this? After making sense of such patterns, we can use these insights to train care professionals, helping them to better understand and work with what matters to those we care about.