Guidebook for Patients' Relatives

With the main objectives of our partnership, such as carrying out an innovative & creative study with an European multi-disciplinary approach, we want to actualize this EU LLP LdV partnership project with the title of "Guiding the patients' relatives with the help of illness management handbook including the 50 most common illnesses" (e-book in German language) and get into this partnership with the experienced organizations in their fields from different European countries.In daily life; we, as the specialists in all European health sector, come across with lots of people with different kinds of health problems and try to produce solutions for them. In this manner, there is a crucial mission falls to patient relatives, but there is a big deficiency on the point of directing them for the patients' illness management in European countries.

In paralel with this need of health sector and the aims of European Union, we will implement some mobilities, workshops, online surveys/studies and, after defining the 50 most common illnesses by the project partners, prepare an 'illness management guidebook' for the patients' relatives, as the project output.

Many of common encountered problems and observed deficiencies in health sector related to patients' relatives is that there is a inadequancy about that they don't know how to take care their patients and they don't have information about their needs of psycohologic, biologic and social. Naturally, they get in panic and they cannot manage the illness process well during & after the treatment and the patient feels embarrasment.

Afterwards, this situation reveals a depression for both patients and patients' relatives, and develops a social handicap. After revealing the depression & unhappiness, this manner reflects to the health organizations economically and psychologically (hospitals etc.), but the health organizations see this manner as an additional time and cost waste, so there is a need, illness management handbook, revealing in this point.

As a NGO, we and our partners, will implement many seminars/workshops and mobilities via our approaches of this project and the project stake holders will talk about the solution ways of the problems observed in illness management field in these seminars for the purpose of clearing these problems and raising the quality of illness management to international norms and at the end of the project we will prepare an illness management guidebook for patients' relatives, including the 50 most common illnesses such as heart problems, cancers, asthma, allergy, diabetics, obesity... (These illnesses will be defined exactly in the workshops by project partners.)

We hope our final work, this guidebook, which will be prepared for patients' relatives, the health sector specialists, and society, will terminate these common problems and it will be helper about these issues for humanbeings in Europe.

Our other concrete goals in this project are:

• • to enhance the attractiveness of vocational education and training and mobility for employers and individuals and to facilitate the mobility of working trainees,
  • to support the integration of the institutions from the same sector to the common policy of European Union,
  • to support improvements in quality and innovation in vocational education and training systems, institutions and practices,
  • to unify the modern theories and practices with a European aspect in a strong partnership and continual collaboration,
  • to support the development of innovative contents, services, pedagogies and practices for lifelong learning.

Dr. Gerhard R. Pelz, Dr. Birgitt Kraft