Veneto, the Health Budget is coming: starting in 2025 for mental health.

With a resolution approved on proposal of the Councillor for Health and Social Affairs, Manuela Lanzarin, the Regional Council of Veneto, implementing the agreement approved at national level at the Unified State-Regions Conference, approved the guidelines for the implementation of the Health Budget within the Mental Health Departments.

"To provide an effective response to the complexity of problems related to mental health protection – he points out Lanzarin - it is essential to create the structural conditions for an integration, as articulated as possible, of the policies and resources of the health system with those of the social health and social system. For this reason, we place at the center of the intervention the capacity of a territory to provide responses that integrate the needs of care with those of work and residential, experimenting integrated paths of social inclusion for those categories of patients (with serious mental disorders) who are in fact most discriminated against by the labor market, the real estate market and by socio-cultural contexts".

The “Health Budget” is proposed as a flexible and powerful innovation tool to aim for full integration between social and health services, to take appropriate care of people's needs, and this is even more true in an area such as mental health where inclusion, participation and social integration are vital parts of the therapeutic-rehabilitative intervention.

The aim of the Health Budget is to promote the greatest possible integration of people in the territory and in the active life associated with it, through the activation of available formal and informal resources. This tool aims to contrast and prevent the chronicity, isolation and stigma of the person with mental disorders, creating a link between the care system and the community system, aimed at an appropriate and integrated use of the resources of both.

It was born as an integrated social and health tool to support the "Individualized Therapeutic Rehabilitation Project" (PTRI) of people with serious mental disorders and consists of individual, family, social and health resources aimed at improving health with a view to personal recovery. It allows to harmonize the treatment path and the life project of the person and foresees the participation and subscription of all the subjects interested in the project in various ways.

"The regional lines - highlights Lanzarin - have been defined by a specific Working Group, with areas of intervention such as support for home care to assist the person in managing the home, support for training orientation and job placement, interventions to support integration and social inclusion. To do so - he added - investments are also needed, which is why we have decided to activate a specific spending line with 2 million euros per year, starting from the near 2025. The Ullss will then define their own operating procedure within the first six months of this resolution".

The Budget is activated in favor of people taken in charge by the Mental Health Departments who present a mental disorder with complex health and social needs and low social functioning, which determine risks of marginalization, loss of social and work skills, recrudescence of the disease and chronicity.

It is achieved by promoting co-design and implementation between the interested party, the public service, the primary reference network and the third sector that enhances and develops a “transversal network” work, through the sharing/participation of projects, resources and implementation responsibilities.

It is based on a personalized therapeutic program characterized by maximum integration and flexibility of intervention of health and social services, with, among other objectives, that of strengthening home interventions and promoting the inclusion and maintenance of patients in their living environment, starting from the family, social and work context.