Involving people with mental health problems - Fourth partners meeting, Florence, 06-07 November 2006
Since the last meeting of the project partners and the European Advisory Committee in May 2006, MHE had prepared a summary report of the analyses that were carried out by the project partners regarding the situation of social exclusion of people with mental health problems in each of the partner countries. The report was sent by MHE to the partners for dissemination through the local and national media, and it was also disseminated by MHE in the form of a press release.
The project partners had established contact with the national authorities and raised awareness of the project and the situation of social exclusion of people with mental health problems in the country; some of them had got very involved in the drafting of the National Reports on Strategies for Social Protection and Social Inclusion 2006-2008 (formerly called National Action Plans on Social Inclusion). MHE congratulated the project partners on their efforts and pointed out that it is important that the project partners, who have successfully found an entry into this process and have made their voices heard in the drafting of these reports, shall not abandon the whole issue now, but closely monitor the implementation of the National Reports.
Since the last partners all the project partners had also continued to put a lot of effort into collecting good practices, either by sending out requests for good practices or by directly contacting people or organisations who are carrying out good practices. The good practices were then discussed in focus groups, which were organized in each of the partner countries, with the involvement of (ex)users of mental health services, in order to select the best of all the collected good practices based on our defined quality criteria. The focus groups were very different in their approach to the task some very academic in starting with finding a common definition of social inclusion and discussing very in-depth the personal experiences of the users; others consisted of successive meetings, one with users only and another one where professionals were confronted with the evaluations done by the users however, all the focus groups were successful in their own way in determining the best practices for promoting the social inclusion of people with mental health problems.
Belgium, the Czech Republic, Scotland and Slovakia were chosen as countries to be visited for the field exchange visits. The visits will serve as an opportunity for the project partners to learn about the selected best practices and to establish synergies and possibilities for future cooperation.