Abstract
Background. “Fem un PAS: Programa d’Acompanyament a la Salut “ is a social and healthcare integration project that addresses the need for support for frail elderly people during a sensitive moment such as a hospital visit.
Approach. The service consists of offering accompaniment by a volunteer to users over 65 years of age, who are frail and who attend their scheduled medical visits at the hospital alone. The user can be accompanied from home or from the hospital door and can go by their own means, with public transport or with non-urgent medical transport.
The volunteer enters the medical consultation and ensures that the user can express everything they need and understand what the health professional explains to them, ensuring that their decisions are respected and they feel supported and safe. Although the accompaniment ends when the user arrives home, the project continues with the volunteer informing the clinical assistant about the course of the visit, sending the comprehension test carried out by the user and, in turn, the assistant scheduling a visit to your reference family doctor so that appropriate clinical follow-up can be carried out.
In parallel with the support, users are referred to make a social assessment of their situation, reviewing which social resources they have activated and which ones they need to, if necessary, activate or expand them.
The selection of the target population was done actively by exploiting data from users with visits already scheduled in the Hospital del Mar and on the other hand, placing posters in the Primary Care Center informing about this support service.
If the user accepted, they signed an informed consent authorizing the volunteer to be aware of confidential data related to the health process and, at the same time, the volunteer also signed a confidentiality document regarding the user's data.
Results. Of the 16 users included in the project, 12 were accompanied, which represents having accompanied 75% of the users. Of the tests carried out, the results were 89.5% of correct understanding. In the assessment of emotional well-being, 10 responses were obtained from 12 accompanied users, all with a score greater than 27, which indicates that it was an emotionally positive experience. All project users had an initial assessment by Health Social Work. In 3 cases, the procedures to request the Dependency Law were initiated, in 4 users the degree of dependency was reviewed and one user was processed for the Home Care service.
Implications.This project has shown that it is a very effective initiative to improve care, in terms of quality of care and emotional well-being of elderly and frail people who visit themselves in the hospital, offering them an experience focused on their person. And in addition, it has facilitated the detection of unmet needs and has helped to fill social deficiencies detected in the system.
To ensure a future for the project, we propose to include these accompaniment as internships for students of the Degree in Care of people in a situation of dependency.