Supporting families attending a relative with Alzheimer disease or other dementia diseases at home, ensuring continuity in assistance and care management: this is the aim of the CARE Project, which was presented this morning in Villa Zamparo in Basiliano (UD). Two Case&Care manager will be available to families residing in the social-welfare area of Medio Friuli until February 2020.

The Pilot Action is part of the European Project Interreg V-A Italy-Austria “CaRe – a sustainable approach to Case&Care management into cross-borders regions”, where there are allocated 340,000 Euros for the territory, thanks to the involvement of the Inter-communal Union of Medio Friuli supported by Informest and Health Care Agency n.3 “High Friuli-Collinare-Middle Friuli”,  with the Codroipo District and in collaboration with IPAB of Vicenza and two Austrian partners: UMIT (the Private University of Health Sciences, Computer Science and Medical Technology of Hall in Tirol) and Gemnova Srl (service company founded by the Tyrolean Government).

This experimentation is addressed to the elderly population (over 65) suffering from dementia pathologies, with particular reference to Alzhaimer, living in the territory of the Middle Friuli.

 “Developing primary care and make it closer as possible to the needs of our citizens is one of the institutional goals of ours Union of Municipalities. The CaRe experimentation allows us to have a contact point active for 12 months that will support our general practitioner and also family parents, which can use this tool to report the need of social-health care for people over 65 years old affected by dementia problems, especially Alzheimer. It was a great team work, which saw the UTI of Middle Friuli talk with the ASP “Moro” and the Azienda Sanitaria, with great benefits for the territory. I think it is an important moment for all of us, which marks the start of a new collaboration” said Marco Del Negro, UTI Medio Friuli President.

“Thinking about the support of the family by the system of services, in these 12 months our aim is to further integration of the network, and so to promote informal support (family, neighbourhood, volunteers) to connect it with the formal one guaranteed by the services, in a logic of vertical subsidiarity. The gathering of detailed information on out territory will be useful for us to have an updated pictures of the need expressed by the population, verifying the overall holding level of the network , favouring the development of new synergies to respond to the identified critical issues” continued Paolo Fortuna, responsible of the n.4 “Codroipese” District.

The main objective of the CaRe Project is to improve caring of these people, through a constant monitoring of both population needs and wide range of services and social-health services. In Friuli Venezia Giulia Region this monitoring will take place through the implementation of two professional figures: the Case Manager and the Care Manager. The first one will deal concretely with the care of the person. Thanks to the collaboration with the social and health services of the territory, general practitioners, pharmacies and local associations, the Case Manager will collect the reports about people with dementia problems, starting the procedures of taking charge and collecting data about social-health needs of the person himself.

The Care Manager, based on the data collected on these needs, will have to monitor the offer of the services, pointing out any malfunctions in the provision of the services and proposing solutions for the resolution. He will also promote the experimentation of the CaRe Project on the territory, aiming to bring out and put in the system all the initiatives, most of them are informal, that can offer effective solutions to people need.

Case & Care Management represents an innovation in taking charge of patients from social-health services, and it founds its principles on integration between Case Management (based on the attention and respect of the specificity of the patient, in terms of care and needs), a practice already widespread in Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, and Care Management, which involves the development and promotion in the territory of effective networks for the provision of services able to respond to the patients’ specifies.

The “CaRe” Project has been launched in February 2018, after a first phrase of analysis of the status quo on the management and welfare system of the elderly in Friuli Venezia Giulia, Veneto Region and Tyrol and the take-over of socio-demographic and assistance data. Now the Project is entering into a crucial phase of launching the pilot actions in both 3 regions. Friuli Venezia Giulia Region is the first one to have started the experimentation.