With Establishment of national Care and development centers we support elite Athletes in balancing their sports and education/employment REsults

WE_CARE will address the void of adequate dual career (DC) supporting services for elite athletes in less developed EU Member States (MS) or MS candidates; Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. The problem has been identified through research and experience exchange. The main objective of the project is to improve DC support in less developed MS and in such way to contribute to priority: to promote education in and through sport with special focus on skills development, as well support the implementation of the EU Guidelines on DC of Athletes through (a) involvement of experts in DC support, sport and education/work performance, injury prevention, psychology, career counseling, and (b) mutual exchange of best practices of DC support providers. In order to achieve this objective, the project will establish 3 National Athletic Care and Development Centers (NACDC), develop a catalogue of services which should be provided by established NACDCs and develop an innovative web application a Comprehensive Athlete Information System (CAIS) which will have a comprehensive set of information about elite athletes necessary to provide a high-quality DC support and which will enable knowledge sharing between DC providers. To deliver these project partners will: conduct a research on services that NACDC should provide, develop a catalogue of multidisciplinary services and programs that should be provided to elite athletes, develop a guidelines on injury prevention strategies, establish three NACDCs, develop CAIS software, conduct a research on the effectiveness of developed guidelines and CAIS and finally organize a conference on WE_CARE project results in Iceland, Spain, Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia. As a result, 60 elite athletes will use DC services in established NACDCs during project and it is expected that this number will rise since established NACDCs will continue to support elite athletes after the end of the project and CAIS will be further developed based on user feedback.