LeTs-Care: Learning from long-term care practices for the European Care Strategy
LeTs-Care is a Horizon Europe research project (Grant Agreement No. 101132701) coordinated by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The project runs from April 2024 to September 2027 and brings together researchers and stakeholders from across Europe to contribute to the development of more equitable, sustainable and high-quality long-term care policies and practices.
European societies face growing challenges in providing accessible, affordable and high-quality long-term care (LTC). Population ageing, changing family structures and increasing care needs are putting pressure on care systems, while low pay, precarious employment, staff shortages and a strong reliance on informal and migrant caregivers continue to affect the quality and sustainability of care.
These challenges vary considerably across countries and territories. Long-term care systems differ in the way responsibilities are distributed between families, public authorities, markets and social organisations, as well as in their levels of public investment, provision of services, cash benefits and reliance on formal and informal care.
LeTs-Care – Learning from long-term care practices for the European Care Strategy – investigates how these challenges are experienced and addressed in different national and local contexts. Rather than simply identifying and transferring “best practices”, the project seeks to understand which practices are meaningful and effective within particular institutional, social and territorial contexts.
The research focuses on seven European countries — Austria, Denmark, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain — comparing long-term care systems, inequalities and emerging care practices. It combines policy analysis, territorial indicators, ethnographic research, comparative methods and participatory approaches.
LeTs-Care is structured around three main objectives:
1. To provide an in-depth understanding of long-term care challenges across different national and local contexts, focusing particularly on affordability and accessibility, quality of care, quality of care work and financial sustainability.
2. To analyse innovative and integrative care practices and assess their potential to respond to these challenges, paying attention to the tensions, choices and trade-offs that emerge in their implementation.
3. To develop a new approach to policy learning, moving beyond the traditional idea of transferring “best practices” towards identifying meaningful practices that can inform policies while taking local and institutional contexts into account.
Through this approach, LeTs-Care aims to generate evidence and practical recommendations for policymakers and stakeholders and to contribute to the implementation and development of the European Care Strategy.
The project is funded by the European Union under the Horizon Europe – Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society programme.
The Institute of Public Goods and Policies (IPP-CSIC) participates in LeTs-Care as part of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) team.
The IPP-CSIC team is coordinated by:
Francisco Javier Moreno Fuentes
Senior Researcher at the Institute, who acts as CSIC coordinator, key researcher and task leader within the project. His research focuses on the comparative analysis of public policies, particularly in the fields of immigration, welfare, healthcare, long-term care and urban policies.
Also participating from IPP-CSIC are:
Permanent Research Fellow. Her research focuses on the relationship between welfare and mobility, with particular attention to welfare and migration policies, their implementation and reform.
Research Fellow. His research focuses on the territorial governance of welfare states and social policies, comparative federalism and multilevel government.
Permanent Research Fellow. Her research focuses particularly on welfare state reform and social policies from a comparative perspective.
Sebastián Umpiérrez de Reguero
Research Fellow. His research focuses on comparative politics and public policy, with particular attention to migration, political and welfare attitudes and electoral studies.
LeTs-Care is coordinated by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and brings together universities, research institutions and organisations from several European countries, including Roskilde University, the University of Amsterdam, CSIC, ISM University of Management and Economics, the University of Porto, the University of Innsbruck and the European Network of Cities and Regions for the Social Economy (REVES).
The first public outputs of the project are now available in open access.
In July 2026, the Spanish national reports produced within Work Package 2 (WP2) were published on Zenodo. Together, these five reports provide a comprehensive analysis of the current challenges facing long-term care in Spain, covering five key dimensions:
- Quality of long-term care.
- Care work and working conditions.
- Long-term care needs.
- Inequalities.
- Sustainability.
These reports represent one of the project’s first major scientific outputs and offer an evidence-based overview of the Spanish long-term care system. Their findings will contribute to the forthcoming comparative analysis across the seven participating countries, which is expected to be published following approval by the European Commission.
