The SPRINT project aims to give meaning to the concept of social investment as applied to long-term care provision.  Its objective is to:

• Provide a means for assessing the social costs and benefits of various ways of providing long-term care for the frail elderly,
• present examples of approaches that do indeed, facilitate provision in a way that social benefits are achieved and
• articulate in more detail the aspirations of the Commission’s Social Investment Package

More specifically, SPRINT will:

• identify the current landscape of organisation and resourcing of LTC in Europe in order to understand the place in the discussion that social investment currently has, and how the principles of social investment used to improve provision in a fashion that is welfare enhancing;
• investigate how the different resourcing and delivery forms of LTC create social and economic returns, outcomes and social impact and to determine factors that contribute to this;
• review the regulatory and institutional incentives or gaps at national and EU level that promote or hinder the provision of an acceptable level of care provision for frail individuals;
• study in depth the role of all actors in the field of LTC and asses their contribution to the achievement of broader goals, such as active ageing, economic growth and improvement of the status of women both as participants in the labour force and as the principal providers of informal care;
• evaluate the fiscal and social costs and benefits of various national approaches to LTC delivery;
• establish a common vocabulary for social investing and for the financing mechanisms of long-term care;
• identify the most appropriate frameworks for the definition and analysis of social impact of LTC programmes;
• define the principles for incorporating social considerations into decisions about how to resource LTC policies and analyse how these contribute to addressing the challenges of demographic ageing and inequities of access to care;
• develop appropriate instruments that will enable successful implementation of investment in LTC by public authorities, social insurance funds and private investors;
• create a model of investment in the care sector, emphasising social innovations that will be correlated with the broad economic policies; and
• formalise and propose at policy level reforms that could help overcome fiscal, regulatory and recognition barriers for the development and scaling up of social innovation in, and for, the provision of long-term care services in Europe.