Mini Conference on Post Covid-19 Mental Care Pathways
5th June, 2023. 11:00 (CET) online
Organized by the Working Group 2 (WG2) of the COST Action CA19136 “International Interdisciplinary Network on Smart Healthy Age-Friendly Environment”
An objective of the WG2 in this COST Action is to collect, synthesize and improve existing knowledge for the design of SHAFE and integrated care pathways. During the Covid-19 pandemic, each EU citizen had to be confronted that that their accessibility to the general medical services was substantially reduced. The earlier pathways did not work, the system became chaotic and imbalanced. Mental health patients suffered a lot relatively, because of the increased demand from the patients’ side, while the health system operated with limited, many times reduced capacities. In Hungary, for example 30 thousand hospital beds were reallocated to infected patients within days that meant in-patient care was suddenly stopped in many areas including psychiatric in-patient care. Patients were simply sent home, only the lifesaving medical operations have been done. WG2 therefore decided in Hamburg that they start an EU wide survey about the state of mental care pathways by a questionnaire. If the methodology is elaborated then it can be applied for other areas of medical care pathways like chronic disease management, impaired patient care.
The mini conference was held on 5th of June, online. There were three lecturers: Sandra Ferreira, WG2 member, integrated healthcare subgroup leader; Francisco Sampaio, registered nurse, PhD. from University of Porto, an invited speaker and Károly Oriold, therapist, Budapest (Hungary) the founder of the In the Soul at Home Foundation, an invited speaker. Sandra Ferreira talked about the results of a Portuguese national study that investigated the connection between Covid-19 illness and mental symptoms. She also presented an EU Covid-19 research data platform. Francisco Sampaio presented lots of charts showing that Covid-19 had an uneven impact on global health, discussed the consequences of the first and second lockdown then shared research results on the effects of Covid-19 pandemic on nurses’ mental health, who have been in the frontline day and night caring infected patients. Károly Oriold talked about the patients’ right to access to a treatment, which was questioned by the pandemic measures. Sometime the consequences were fatal. Mental patients are very weak, when they try to execute their statutory rights to some benefits or get access to a treatment. His foundation provides legal consultation for families with a mentally ill member.
The program:
11:00 – 11:40 Sandra Ferreira: On post-covid mental health experiences in Portugal
11:40 – 12:20 Francisco Sampaio: Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of healthcare workers and general population
12:20 – 13:00 Károly Oriold: Patients’ rights and COVID, the restriction of access to health services and its consequences to our days