COMFORTage’s fourth Community Forum was held on 27 February 2026, supported by EHTEL and the Laurel project. The joint webinar brought together contributors from both projects, along with international experts from Australia, Belgium, Finland, Italy, Romania, Scotland, and Spain. 

The webinar was one in a series of webinars presented in the COMFORTage Community Forum (CCF) programme – Thematic Area 1: Dementia and Frailty Service Delivery Models for affected patients and their carers led by EHTEL. It formed part of the project’s “synergy activities” with other initiatives and projects.

The session focused on a concern shared by the two projects: how to move from fragmented systems of dementia and frailty care towards integrated, prevention-oriented, data-informed ecosystems that genuinely improve people’s lives.

Watch the video below to see presentations and the panellists' discussions.⤵️

Takeaways

The session synthesised a number of messages on integrating social and healthcare models. It drew on a variety of national contexts – from Australia to Finland and Italy – and captured wider international viewpoints.

• Bridging gaps in fragmentation needs a shared language, shared governance, and shared incentives.

• Data provides a powerful lever for transformation, but only if accompanied by data literacy, trust, and local capacity. Good-quality data can enable predictive, preventive and personalised care.

• Prevention must become systemic. Essential components of sustainable systems include early detection of social withdrawal, risk stratification at population level, and life-course approaches to dementia risk reduction.

• Digital innovation must reduce complexity. Among the most promising digital tools are those which are accessible, structured, and embedded in everyday practice.

• Integration must remain person-centred. Systems must support meaningful lives, not merely manage decline.

Hence, an overall transformation is needed that redefines roles, mobilises communities, strengthens data literacy, integrates social and health data, and re-focuses care around human dignity and meaning.

Overview and general background

Luc Nicolas from EHTEL framed the discussion on the need for a broader transformation by emphasising that integration must now go beyond the previous ambition of simply connecting clinical care with social care. In the past, integration largely meant having a more efficient coordination of existing services. Today, however, the challenge is broader and more transformative. Three fundamental shifts are therefore needed.

• The perspective must move from reactive care to prevention. Prevention demands earlier engagement, new types of actors, and new forms of collaboration that extend beyond traditional healthcare providers.

• Roles in systems need to evolve. Integration requires rethinking who contributes to care and how responsibilities are distributed.

• Digital health and data are central enablers of transformation. Data must help actors to take the right decisions at the right time, and systems must be designed to make this kind of initiative possible.

These three reflections set the tone for the whole webinar. Collectively, the speakers argued for a broader, general structural and societal transformation – one that redefines roles, mobilises communities, strengthens data literacy, integrates social and health data, and re-focuses care around human dignity and meaning.

Speakers

💠 Marco Albertini: Reframing the Ageing Challenge - From Care Delivery to System Redesign in Italy

Italy’s Age-It initiative provided an illustration of the scale of this challenge for people with dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Like many European countries, Italy faces two challenges – “ageing from the top” and “ageing from the bottom”. This demographic shift in ageing creates a structural imbalance: while more people need long-term care, fewer formal and informal caregivers are available to provide it.

Marco emphasised that traditional approaches are no longer sufficient – even intensive pilot projects reach just a few dozen beneficiaries. Instead, scalability is crucial. Sustainable models need to be developed that can reach thousands of people.

A key criticism concerned institutional fragmentation. This dynamic results in a “family-by-default” model: the family/informal carers become primary care coordinators not by design, but due to an absence of alternatives.

In terms of trends, the Age-It initiative responds to this focus on the family by shifting attention towards caregivers rather than focusing exclusively on care recipients. As a solution, the initiative monitors caregiver wellbeing by integrating social indicators into health risk detection. Importantly, social withdrawal was identified as an early warning signal.

This trend illustrates an important conceptual shift: long-term care sustainability increasingly depends on spatial, social, and community infrastructures.

Overall, this Italian presentation emphasised the importance of structural redesign.

💠Jodie Hillen: Data Without Literacy - Lessons from Australia

The Australian experience highlighted a different but equally pressing issue, the growing gap between data production and data capability.

The work of Aged Care Research and Industry Innovation Australia (ARIIA) was launched in the wake of Australia’s 2021 Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. Flagship programmes have been organised to handle the data literacy, quality, and capacity challenges. An Aged Care Data and Digital Strategy (2024-2029) has also been formulated. Following sweeping reforms, aged care – a term used in Australia to refer to the provision of care to older adults – providers now collect extensive datasets on mandatory quality indicators, staffing levels, and clinical measures.

The initiative has revealed a striking paradox, however. Although vast amounts of data are collected, many providers lack the digital maturity and data literacy needed to use data effectively. Reporting cultures were often punitive rather than being oriented towards improvement.

Education/training of the workforce emerged as a critical element. Care workers are highly committed and motivated by a desire to “do good”, yet they rarely receive training in data management or analytics. 

A particularly powerful message was the call to move from a culture of compliance to a culture of curiosity. ARIIA encouraged organisations to ask what is data telling us, and how one can learn from it. This shift – from “furious” to “curious” – reflects a broader need to create organisationally safe environments where providers can acknowledge weaknesses without fear of punishment.

The Australian case reinforced a central lesson. Data integration is a cultural, educational, and governance challenge.

💠Sirpa Irene Impinen and Kari Mikkonen: Finland - Structure, Meaning and Everyday Joy

The Finnish contribution brought a complementary perspective to the Italian and Australian examples. It focused on how structured digital tools can enhance daily life in long-term care settings.

Representatives from the City of Helsinki and Sentina Oy described the company’s long-term evolution from technically complex, engineer-driven platforms towards user-friendly, device-independent solutions. Over 25 years, Sentina Oy has transitioned from high-barrier systems to accessible, low-threshold digital services designed to support meaningful daily activities.

A key insight was that content alone is insufficient. Providing music, reminiscence materials, or exercise modules does not guarantee impact. What also matters is structure – the provision of a method that ensures activities are embedded in daily routines and adapted to each person’s “functional status” (i.e., an individual’s ability to carry out activities of daily living independently).

The integration of Finland’s Resident Assessment Instrument (RAI) into activity planning provided an example of this approach. Assessment data inform decisions – such as in care homes – about which group activities are appropriate for which residents in care homes. In this way, measurement becomes actionable.

Sirpa and Kari suggested that digitalisation should enable joy and self-determination – not merely efficiency.

Panellists

The panel discussion, moderated by Sara Canella and Luc Nicolas, broadened the lens of the discussion towards integrated ecosystems.

Representatives from four internationally-oriented associations – Eurocarers, the International Foundation for Integrated Care, the Intras Foundation, and the Ana Aslan Foundation – resulted in convergence on four themes.

• Prevention must begin earlier. Population-level screening and risk reduction strategies must be extended into people’s mid-life, and even earlier.
• Informal caregivers are the backbone of every system. To relieve the weight carried by caregivers requires a formal recognition of their needs, early identification of their needs, and structured support.
• Integration depends on governance as much as technology. There are important questions related to data ownership, access rights, and purpose. Social services hold critical information about people’s isolation, daily functioning, and informal support networks. The inclusion of social services/social data in data ecosystems is indispensable.
• The human dimension is vital. Measuring intrinsic capacity – people’s ability to move, think, and interact – may be more meaningful than measuring the absence of disease. Music, culture, and nature are not luxuries; they are legitimate components of health promotion and frailty prevention.

All four of these issues are of key importance.

Conclusions and next steps

This synthesis of initiatives and ideas on integrated healthcare and social models for dementia and frailty drew on a variety of national and international contexts.

The general conclusions were that:

• Bridging the gaps between healthcare and social care needs a shared language, shared governance, and shared incentives.
• Data itself can provide a powerful lever for transformation, but it needs to be accompanied by data literacy, trust, and local capacity. Prevention must become systemic.
• Digital innovation must reduce complexity. Promising digital tools are accessible, structured, and embedded in everyday practice. Integration must remain person-centred. Systems must support meaningful lives, not merely manage decline.
• Overall, a transformation is needed that redefines roles, mobilises communities, strengthens data literacy, integrates social and health data, and re-focuses care around human dignity and meaning.

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Watch out for more on the work of both COMFORTage and Laurel over the next couple of years, especially in terms of the potential for next steps.

Learn more about the COMFORTage Community Forum. 

Find out more about the Laurel project.