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    Would you like to participate?

    Stories matter

    Stories tell us about what is important in someone's life and what makes a difference to someone. That is why we ask you to share your stories about care and caring in times of Covid-19. This may be about an experience that has stuck with you or something that you find illustrative for the past few months.

     

    We ask you to capture this in words, which can be as long or short as you like, and share this with us. You can share your story through this link. On average people share stories of about 10-15 lines. After this, we will ask you a couple of questions about this story and some demographic details (for instance age, country). You can share your story here.

     

    On the basis of your answers, we can compare the stories. You can share one story, but you can always come back to the website to share more stories. Your stories will be used anonymously to better understand how care and caring looks like during Covid-19. We will also use your stories anonymously to train (future) care professionals in listening, understanding and developing practices that fit with stories that matter.

  • What we do

    Our ambition

    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.

    Our project

    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.

    Your contribution

    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.

    Who we are

    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.

    What happens to your stories

    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.

  • Who are we?

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    Laura Mazzoli Smith

    School of education

    Durham University is a collegiate, public research university in the North East of England, UK. It is a world top 100 university, which conducts interdisciplinary work on health co-ordinated through its Wolfson Institute for Health and Wellbeing.

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    Catherine Butcher

    National Innovation Centre Ageing

    Newcastle university is a public research university based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, North East England, UK. With both the National Innovation Centre for Ageing and a large medical school and teaching hospitals, Newcastle University is at the forefront of research on health.

  • Contact

    Would you like more information about this project? Please contact us.