L'Hospitalet de Llobregat presented the Local Plan for Addressing Homelessness in the auditorium of La Florida 6.0, within the Territorial Metropolitan Mental Health Integration Plan, with the participation of health, psychology, and social services professionals.
The main tension addressed by the document is the care of homeless people with mental health problems or substance use issues, a profile that municipal teams detect recurrently while the involved services are still working on defining clear circuits to prevent the person being attended from going through multiple windows and being victimized again.
The plan seeks to prevent the person being attended from repeating their itinerary through various services
The document proposes to organize interventions with clear circuits between resources to ensure more efficient care. Health, psychology, and social services teams participate in the development of the plan, contributing to drafting a joint proposal.
Anna Descalzi, a psychologist at the L'Hospitalet Nord Mental Health Unit, advocated for coordination between areas to improve the outcome of care.
"To be able to establish collaboration, follow-up, support, so that this work can be more integrated and more fruitful in its outcome" - Anna Descalzi, psychologist, L'Hospitalet Nord Mental Health Unit
During the presentation, the shared focus was on connecting the social and health responses within the same framework. The session was held at La Florida 6.0, one of the spaces where the municipality develops initiatives linked to community care.
Conxi Cruz identifies mental health and substance use among the most repeated problems
Conxi Cruz, head of the City Council's Homelessness and Social Emergencies Program, linked the plan's content to the daily experience of teams working with people on the street. She identified two factors that commonly appear in interventions.
"When we work with people on the street, we know that one of the most repeated and common problems is mental health and substance use" - Conxi Cruz, head of the City Council's Homelessness and Social Emergencies Program
Cruz also underlined the value of presenting the plan together with the health sector and of activating a shared line of work. In his speech, he emphasized that the willingness to undertake joint actions with that area is relevant for deploying the local response.
In addition to the diagnosis, attendees expressed the need to create specific social emergency devices for homelessness. This approach was added to the presentation of the plan in La Florida 6.0, within the framework of the Metropolitan Territorial Mental Health Integration Plan.