Legal protection and promotion of caregiver's well-being. Legislative innovations and good practices

The project intends to develop a model of protection for family caregivers who deal with elderly and frail people and to promote institutional, corporate and social awareness of their well-being. The Italian social welfare system recognizes the primary interest of dependent persons to be cared for within their own family environment and states the principle of the primary role of the family in assisting frail people; despite this, it does not provide for adequate material support measures (as such services, daily centers, etc.) and uniform national legal protection. While caregivers who care for minors and handicapped people can use the work-family balance tools envisaged by Law 104/1992, caregivers of elderly and frail people don’t have adequate facilities. Attempts to achieve legal recognition - and most recently also in the context of the reforms envisaged in the PNRR plan - had little support from the scientific community and have, up to now, stalled. Concerning the legal literature, the scarce interest shown in the care and assistance spontaneously provided within the family towards the elderly, frail, and/or deprived of autonomy can be traced back to the fact that these are tangible assets, as such “legally irrelevant”. Faced with this lack of protection, the project intends to provide interdisciplinary scientific support which, through a preliminary definition of the tasks of the caregiver and the indicators of his well-being, leads to the development of a model for the protection and promotion of the caregiver's well-being. In this sense, the aim is primarily to identify forms of protection that must and/or can be adopted to guarantee adequate legal compensation for the assistance work carried out in the care of the frail and elderly family member, but also, and above all, support tools in carrying out care tasks. The elaboration of this model will take into account the company practices developed in the national territory to facilitate the worker who takes care of the non-autonomous fragile elderly person and the forms of work-family balance provided for in our legal system in favor of other caregivers (especially parents and relatives of a handicapped person). The research has the further objective of promoting an institutional, corporate and social awareness campaign, through the involvement of all potential stakeholders (local authorities, foundations, companies, patronages), which ultimately aims at the legislative approval of an adequate and uniform legal framework on the national territory for family caregivers.