Final phase - Fifth partners meeting, Brussels, 24 March 2006
Malgorzata Kmita, MHE President, welcomed all participants to this meeting and shared her impressions from the field exchange visits. She emphasised that mental health and well-being is a dynamic concept and that this was well illustrated through the visits to good practices that connected mental health and well-being with all other aspects of life, physical health, employment, housing, families and the social environment etc. The projects also show how the voices of users can influence the development of services, policies and structures.
The final conference of the project was another point of discussion on the agenda. It will be held on Friday, 01 June 2007 (9-18h) in the frame of the MHE Conference 2007 in Vienna, Austria. The first session of the conference will address the issue of mental health and social inclusion from a broad perspective and highlight the achievements and challenges in the social inclusion process at the European and national level. The second session will focus on the outcomes of the project, in particular on what has been achieved through the project in terms of raising awareness, establishing cooperation and implementing actions on the national level. The local perspective will be the focus of session three. Project partners and (ex)users of mental health services will highlight the need to empower and involve users in the social inclusion process and present ways how this can be realised. The fourth session will finally recapitulate the lessons learned from the project. Recommendations for strategies to improve the social inclusion of people with mental health problems will be presented and the following discussion will allow for exchanging ideas and views on possibilities for future actions.