On 19th and 20th June 2023, the WP5 partner countries met for the first time onsite in Cologne, Germany to exchange on issues of community-based mental health services and on experiences in the preparation and start of the implementation of their pilot actions and related tasks.
The event hosted by the German Federal Centre for Health Education (BZgA) as a leader of WP5, was attended by JA partner countries participating in WP5, leaders of other WPs, and external experts from the WP5 Advisory Group. Overall, about 65 participants took part in the meeting both onsite and online.
Over the course of 1.5 days, knowledge and opinions were shared, updates provided and ties strengthened between the collaborating partners. On the first day, the topics of intersectoral stakeholder collaboration, mobile/outreach teams as new models of care services, participation of persons by lived experience and peer workers as well as transition from child to adult mental health services in community-based mental health care were debated in a mix of plenary and parallel group sessions. This included inputs from the experts of the WP5 Advisory Group and presentations from selected countries about their planned pilot actions. Findings from the feedback provided by participating countries to a questionnaire on mental health information systems and data collection developed within WP5 were presented and a first list of proposed mental health indicators as part of a dashboard was discussed.
The meeting was also the occasion to share the results from the first training and capacity building activities conducted in a number of participating countries and to look at the way forward.
On the second day, a cross-country focus group discussion about the process of preparing and starting the pilot actions and related challenges was conducted with the support of an external scientific team of the University of Applied Sciences in Bochum, Germany. Within a session facilitated by the leading team of WP3 and dedicated to the evaluation of the pilot actions, the participants were given the opportunity to brainstorm about potential indicators for evaluation of their pilot actions and to exchange about the evaluation process.
The WP5 leading team from BZgA and Regione Lombardia thanks all participants for taking part and contributing to this fruitful meeting!
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