What do we study?
Informal caregivers provide unpaid care to relatives or acquaintances with a chronic illness, disability, or other long-lasting care need. Mostly due to increased longevity and medical advances, the care needs of individuals for long-term care rise rapidly while the availability of informal caregivers decreases. Since the European health care systems rely heavily on the provision of informal care, this so called ‘Care Gap’ will create problems for their sustainability.

What are our main research questions?
• What are the current and future caregiving challenges? What motivates diverse groups of informal caregivers to provide care, also across countries?
• Which specific (psychosocial) interventions, services and technology-based interventions could be helpful to caregivers? How can we best deliver these interventions, services, and tools to sustain willingness to care amongst caregivers?
• How can we promote the implementation and dissemination of evidence-based interventions, services, and tools aimed to support informal caregiving?
We will study these research questions within the ENTWINE network. ENTWINE is a 4-year Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovation Training Network (ITN), funded by the European Union. The Network will employ 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs).

What do we offer? The PhD student will be appointed for a 3-year advanced international, multidisciplinary and intersectoral research training at and conform the conditions of the host organization indicated for each position. Additionally, we offer:
• Transdisciplinary experiences with targeted secondments to practice communities and companies.
• The opportunity to acquire outstanding complementary training in transferable skills (e.g. presentation techniques, networking, publishing, and outreach) as well as leadership, innovation and entrepreneurial skills.
Job description You can find a description of the 15 PhD positions here: https://entwine-itn.eu/research/overview-work-packages/. For details on recruitment procedures, please see: https://entwine-itn.eu/recruitment/. Questions? entwine@umcg.nl.