The unification of health and social care for the elderly is progressing: the experience of the seven territories where it was already carried out this year is being positive and next year the integration will be applied to other municipalities and counties . This was advanced yesterday by the Ministers of Health and Social Rights, Manel Balcells and Carles Campuzano, respectively, during their speech at the IX International Congress on Dependency and Quality of Life that the Edad Foundation
Balcells explained that this requires modifying the current functioning of the healthcare system and prioritizing intermediate care. "We must move forward to care for the elderly and those with chronic pathologies at home, whether they live at home or in a residence, and thus relieve the hospital system and the emergency rooms for these types of patients," he said. And he pointed out that this is why "stronger primary care, more decisive and more capable of serving people wherever they live and of working together with social services and councils to attend to the most vulnerable cases" is essential.
Campuzano specified that this coordination of services must be adapted on a local scale to respond to the needs of each territory, and for this reason the experiences of integration are spreading little by little instead of implementing a single model from the Government. However, Health and Social Rights continue to work on the law that will allow the creation of Catalonia's integrated care agency, "which will be the one that oversees globally and identifies and promotes good practices" that apply in each territory and establishes who and how to hire these services, according to Campuzano.
The councilor explained that issues such as the integration of information systems and salary differences between health and social services personnel have been delaying the creation of this agency. "From the field of Social Rights, we have signed an agreement with employers and unions to advance salary equalization and, although it will not happen overnight, decisions will have to be made to recognize the professionals who work in social services and make this line of employment attractive", pointed out Campuzano.
Balcells said that, despite these complexities, the agency must be the instrument that allows integrated care to be managed and paid for. "People need a single care plan, because now sometimes the social assistance plan overlaps with the health plan; we must move forward to have a single plan and a single case manager who accompanies and coordinates all the resources around that person, be it someone from nursing, a social worker, an emotional well-being referent , of physiotherapy...", he indicated.
This need for integration of socio-health services in the framework of long-term care for elderly and dependent people has been a constant in the interventions and debates of the IX Congress on Dependency and Quality of Life, in which pioneering models of several European countries, including those of Finland, the United Kingdom and the Flanders region. During Monday's session, the philosopher Victoria Camps defended that care must become a universal right, but it must also be a duty to care for others, and she stressed the need to professionalize caregivers and equip them of an ethical training when dealing with such a personal relationship that is established with vulnerable people or in the final stage of their life.
