The document of the Regional Council, created in collaboration with the Health Authorities and the Order of Psychologists, identifies the framework within which the psychological support service in community homes will be activated by 2024. Training courses for some of the staff involved have already begun
December 20, 2023 – There is no health without mental health: the Emilia-Romagna Region makes the words of the World Health Organization its own by inserting another piece in the more comprehensive reorganization of the network of services underway.
They were approved by the Regional Council guidelines for the implementation of psychology in community houses, carried out with the contribution of experts from healthcare companies and the Order of Psychologists of Emilia-Romagna.
The text is one of the first to be made in Italy and has aroused the interest of other Regions and national working groups of psychologists, who have long been committed to obtaining national legislation from Parliament.
For Emilia-Romagna this is a further step towards the activation of a public psychological support service in all community homes, also through the hiring of new professionals. And thanks to the approval of the document, the Region’s health authorities will be able to start with the new service by the end of 2024. Meanwhile, with 25 thousand euros of resources, the project has been started training of some staff who will be involved.
“Let’s take another step forward towards strengthening the network of psychological support services – comments the councilor for health policies, Raffaele Donini– through a complex process that integrates perfectly with the emergency reform. The flood experience convinced us even more of the need to invest in psychology: in those difficult days the assistance provided to the population by professionals was fundamental”.
The address lines represent one summary of the interventions that will be asked of professionals to provide psychological support to an increasingly larger segment of the population: not only the elderly, whose psychological condition is tested by other illnesses, but also those who take care of them (the so-called caregivers), adolescents with their families, new parents , people showing early signs of anxiety or depression. An objective that will also be made possible thanks to technological tools such as telemedicine and the electronic folder.
Awareness about the need to treat mental health has grown globally with the covid-19 pandemicthen, in Emilia-Romagna, with the dramatic ones consequences of the flood last May, when the Region immediately set up a network of over 170 psychologists to provide support to the population. The drafting of the guidelines owes much to these experiences in the field and to experiments started in the local health authorities as early as 2015.
“In 2024 our community houses will be able to provide psychological support thanks to multi-professional teams – he closes Donini-: we will not limit ourselves to identifying the so-called community psychologists, but we will build a network of trained professionals, from general practitioners to nurses, from social workers to paediatricians, able to grasp the signals that require the need for mental care beyond than of the body.”