Fundación Punjab

An emergency is a situation which affects in a tragic way the life and well being of an important group of people and which requires extraordinary actions to guarantee the survival, the care and the protection of affected people. The emergencies include the natural catastrophes such as earthquakes and hurricanes or catastrophes caused by humans such as war conflicts. Given that “emergency” is usual as a concept, it does not apply the same way to different realities; this happened a few years ago with the AIDS virus, which ended in being considered like an “emergency” and it will be very probably the same for drug consumption and its models of prevention.

Considering legal or illegal drug consumption as an emergency is not a banality, when it begins to “affect tragically human beings’ life and well being” and “requires extraordinary actions”. The models built on the prevention of disasters and emergency situations obviously allow adopting a more appropriate psychological, sociological and even ethical posture in order to struggle against drug consumption. The prevention of emergency situations constitutes a fundamental axis which tackles different aspects intimately related to the fact of limiting the impact of the urgency, improving the resilience of involved human groups and developing the capacity of affected human groups so that they defend themselves in an autonomous way from the damages caused to them.

The prevention of disasters includes the permanent collecting and the analysis of information related to the direct and indirect causes and to the consequences of the latter. It is necessary to foresee the key aspects that affect the situation, to define the most vulnerable communities, and to stimulate the own mechanisms of involved human groups to confront the emergency situation; at the same time, it is fundamental to identify the plans and projects conceived by the administrations in order to deal with the consequences of the emergency to make sure that the actions are designed for the weakest and most vulnerable groups. The preparation of the emergency plans aims to minimize the negative effects of the emergency and to make sure that the organization and the planed answers of the emergency answer its temporalization and its effectiveness. On the other hand, it is necessary to take into account that the planning of immediate actions must be accompanied by a long-term planning of the necessary strategies to give a structural answer to the causes which provoke the emergencies. Avoiding the answers of last-minute is fundamental in this process.

The preparation of an emergency plan has to take into account a series of basic questions that it is necessary to prioritize:

·    To generate a strong network of intervention agents who are able to determine what has to be done, how and where, as part of an articulated plan of humanitarian action.
·    A coordinator group who meets the needs with the necessary tools and resources.
·    Financing mechanisms which make the necessary resources possible.
·    A network of information and management ready to deal with key decisions.

The emergency situations affect a high number of population groups, entire States find themselves involved in them; they are usually globalised as is drug consumption. However, it is necessary not to forget that the risky groups, that is to say groups who suffer from a situation of social, economical, cultural, political disadvantage…etc. are particularly vulnerable to situations of disasters and for this, they undergo their consequences more intensely and the negative effects are devastating. The gypsy group, as we developed it in our research, is a risky group and their situation has to be dealt with in priority from this perspective.

Brújula, an intervention project on drug consumption with the Valencian gypsies as a specific group.

A project with such characteristics requires a strategy of multi- sectorial coordination. We know that the causes of drugs consumption are multi-dimensional and for this, the answer has to be discussed/tackled/dealt with from different social and administrative sectors. The sanitary, educational and juridical sectors, the social services, the human rights, the policemen and the security, without forgetting the own actors of the gypsy communities. Each one of them has to rally in order to give an efficient, coordinated and global answer to the actions of the project.

This multi-sectorial approach requires a series of basic elements:

1.    A strategic planning.
2.    Human and material resources.
3.    To articulate a functional planning of the tasks distributed between the autonomous, provincial and local administrations, the private and public institutions and the humanitarian and social organizations.
4.    The fundamental purpose of this multi-sectorial approach is to provide the beneficiaries efficient, appropriate and confidential services.
5.    “Lastly”, this approach must guarantee the active participation by maintaining the protection and the confidentiality of its contributions.

This approach materializes in the following actions of management and coordination:

1.    To articulate a management team of the project.
2.    To articulate a network of public and private entities and autonomous, provincial and local administrations to which the responsible of the different sectors participate: health, education, justice, social services and security bodies and forces.
3.    To develop programmed actions of the project by guaranteeing the active participation of gypsy groups.
4.    All the involved sectors must participate to the working-out and development of the actions of the project to guarantee the maximum efficiency of the prevention actions.
5.    To bring the involved institutions on the actions of the project by making sure that they assume the multi-sectorial perspective which stimulates the convergence of actions and the mutual dependence.
6.    To carry out the diffusion of the relevant information of the project and to guarantee that all the groups have it at their disposal by contrasting in a relevant way the good functioning of the information networks.
7.    To articulate a basis of resources with the objective of progressively amplifying it in order to consolidate the networks, to increase the involved agents’ awareness and to improve the effectiveness of communication with the beneficiaries.
8.    To structure actions of permanent evaluation which will be transmitted in an anonymous way to the managing group of the project.

In the Valencian Community, the most important administrations and institutions in the management of the project would be: Ministry of Health and of FEPAD, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Social Well Being, Ministry of Justice, Provincial Councils, Town Councils, Security Bodies and Forces of the State, Non Governmental Organizations which deal with the drug prevention, and organizations and institutions which deal with the intervention project with the gypsy community.

Phases of the actions of the project.

Phase of consciousness raising designed for gypsy families: the actions of the project hinge on three complementary stages; Consciuosness raising: Conception, edition, diffusion.

Phase of consciousness raising designed for administrations and institutions.

Educational administrations at all the levels, particularly children and young groups.

Administrations related to public security about the importance of establishing preventive and dissuasive measures to face drug consumption.

Sanitary administrations about the necessity of articulating protocols relatives to the prevention and consumption in primary attention and particularly in paediatrics.

Diffusion of the information on the existing resources in the field of drug prevention, on the services that they offer and the lacks that they represent.
Inveiglement process and consciousness raising of the administrations and institutions of any kind related to the project.

Coordination phase

To establish working groups in the provincial sector in order to coordinate the actions to carry out. These working groups structured in networks should count on the representation of the town and provincial administrations, in the sanitary, educational, juridical and social well being environments.

To establish a network of information and diffusion of the contents and progresses of the project and their short- and medium-term actions.

To structure a monitoring and evaluation team of the project at the level of the autonomous Community.

To articulate, temporalize and implement the suggested actions in the project by realizing the appropriate adaptations in order to guarantee the efficiency of the latter.

To develop a guide of already existing resources in different fields related to the prevention of drug consumption: sport, cultural, sanitary, educational and informative activities.

Actions and their implementation.

Actions in the educational environment

To make children and young people who are sent to school aware and to catch their attention through the introduction in the subjects of the curriculum, in public and private centers, of materials related to education for health, as well as physical as mental, and the consequences of drug consumption.

Articulation of formation courses with the collaboration of the CEFIRE (Formation and Resources Centers) designed for the teaching profession in primary and secondary to catch their attention on the importance of offering the pupils some contents of the curriculum of transversal nature in the field of education for health, as well as physical as mental, in the public and private centers of the Valencian Community.

Development of Health Schools between the parents and pupils’ organizations, associations and confederations, by articulating a formative programme which stimulates the participation and implication of fathers and mothers in the education of their children on topics related to health and to the prevention of drug consumption.

To encourage the participation to literary contests in which the pupils of the centers could realize creations through tales, work and express in an artistic way the contents learned about drugs and the negative consequences of their consumption.

Articulation of workshops and guardianships developed for the teaching profession of the primary and secondary centers to deal with the following themes:

·    Development of the emotional intelligence. The perceptions on self-esteem, the acceptation, the positive and constructive development of emotions are the fundamentals factors in the development of the pupils and their attitude towards drugs.
·    Social abilities.
·    Communication strategies.

Development of a web site on health, as well as physical as moral, which gives advice on emotional and sentimental questions, on self-concept, self-esteem and personal development. All this would allow offering the pupils of the centers an area of information and anonymous communication thanks to forums and supervised chats.

Thanks to the subject of the curriculum, we could offer the pupils of the private and public centers artistic activities related to the informative contents about health and drugs.

The programming of plays, musical works, performances, and mime games…etc., musical or dance activities are the artistic instruments which have a strong emotional impact for the spectators and which at the same time supposes for the actors and the participants a process of preparation of the contents which have an educational nature and which guarantees the transmission of contents by relating them to games.

Development of the intercultural mediation in order to use the figure of the intercultural mediator who supports the formative actions developed in the center –in places that are outside the school or in rooms- and which realizes actions of motivation and stimulation designed for gypsy families and other cultural minorities in order to increase their awareness of the importance of education for health and the prevention strategies against drug consumption.

Actions in the environment domain of community development

Designed for the organization of sports activities for children and teenagers’ groups, especially for the ones who find themselves in a risky situation: the ones who live in ghettoes, who are involved in drug trafficking and who lack healthy places for leisure. These activities will organize through sports activities of the local cooperation and private institutions that will aim to promote sport. The organization of sport teams (football, basketball, handball…) specially designed for children and teenagers will be among the fundamental objectives.

Designed for the organization of camps for children and teenagers’ groups and their families. These camps developed in natural places will aim to offer gypsy families an area of formation and leisure in which adults and children will get an intensive formation on health questions and about drug prevention. The implicit objective of these camps is to structure particularly motivated family groups in the field of drug prevention who will become “health agents” to collaborate in other action plans. This action should be developed by the local corporations (social well-being, culture, sports…etc.) in cooperation with gypsy organizations, the UCAs and the formation teams of the Ministry of Sanitary Service.

Brought to the psychosocial support of the consumers who find themselves in a very deteriorated mental and physical situation and who need social and therapeutic support in order to avoid the total deterioration of family relationships which entails important risks for underage children of involved families. This project should count on the resources of the health centers of the area, some UCAs and basic social services in order to implement a support network. In this perspective, the participation of gypsy organizations and mediation teams is fundamental.

Actions in the domain of justice and security bodies and forces.

Directed to increase the awareness of security bodies and forces in this field by means of seminaries as part of the permanent formation structures who receive professionals.

Directed to increase the awareness of civil servants of prison centers and reclusion centers for underage children by means of workshops and seminars on the trans-cultural dimension of drug consumption and prevention strategies in this domain.

Actions in the sanitary environment: outpatients’ department, hospitals, UCAs…etc.

Directed to the formation and to increase the awareness of the medical staff in different fields on the importance of strategy preventions of drug consumption. The purpose is to structure seminars of formation designed for teams in order to improve the communication between the families and the center. This seminar would be implemented by the teaching staff of the Ministry of Sanitary Service, investigator and expert of Universities and Administrations.

Directed to the outpatient’s departments and hospitals in order to structure a place of assistance to the patients where an intercultural mediator who has a specific formation in the sanitary environment could offer support to the patients in order to make the communication easier with the medical teams, the accompaniments, the follow-up of their case, to motivate the families…etc. This seminar would be implemented by the teaching staff of the Ministry of Sanitary Service, investigator and expert of Universities and Administrations.

Directed to the expert medical staff in the field of drug dependence. It would consists in a seminar oriented towards the specific formation of these professionals in the field of the trans-cultural dimension of drugs and their consumption in order to support the actions that they develop in the work environment. This seminar would be implemented by the teaching staff of the Ministry of Sanitary Service, investigator and expert of Universities and Administrations.

Development of actions

Phase of preparation and planning

The planning and preparation of the actions must structure a whole series of preliminary actions that are especially necessary to be taken into account:

1.    Development of a coordination system by specifying the staff responsible for each one of the areas belonging to agencies, institutions or administrations.
2.    An appropriate conception of the plans of preparation to answer the diagnosis realized beforehand.
3.    Formation of the professional teams who will develop the intervention in every zone by establishing coordination, monitoring and evaluation criteria of every action of preparations carried out.
4.    The interventions must be preceded of a meticulous planning and of a consultation on the local context of the groups on which the intervention project will implement. The consultation process requires the participation of a professional team with an inter-disciplinary profile who deal -with an extensive specter- questions of qualitative and quantitative nature about the malfunctioning detected.

Collaborations

The administrations must; as well as the non-governmental organizations, participate to the interventions as advisers and collaborators. The coordination between the different involved agencies is a key aspect.

The introduction of the prevention in primary attention.

To guarantee the access to social and sanitary resources of the beneficiaries for whom the programme is designed.

It is fundamental for the functioning of the actions that each one includes synchronic and diachronic objectives. Every phase and their objectives must be temporalized according to the progress or to the decline of the actions by taking into account the global community development and the participation of the beneficiaries and their adaptation process to the actions carried out.  

Intervention phase

1.    To maintain a fluid and constructive communication flow -as well as horizontal as vertical- between the management teams.
2.    To establish coordination of protocols who will be evaluated in a critical way and permanently in order to guarantee the success of the objectives of every phase.
3.    To structure permanent evaluation instruments and external evaluating agents to guarantee the neutrality of reports.
4.    To generate processes of permanent formation and of theoretical and practical auto-formation in order to guarantee the maximum effectiveness of the initial formation of the agents in the project.
5.    To implement the actions and every conceived objective for each one of them, by carrying out a continuous evaluation process and registries of their malfunctioning or unforeseen results.

Evaluation phase

The evaluation of the project must collect everything which is related to the process, that is to say the derivative of the progressive evaluation reports which gathers the malfunctioning and unforeseen results and the annual evaluation which constitutes an annual report on the objectives projected, the actions carried out and the results obtained.

The evaluation of the project in two simultaneous phases. A phase of internal evaluation in which the responsible teams of every field will carry out a qualitative and quantitative evaluation. This self-evaluation report will be realized by the professional teams of the project by gathering all the information of quantitative and qualitative nature which debrief the relevant information on the development of the project.

The external evaluation phase will be carried out with instruments that will be conceivable beforehand, among other interviews with the beneficiaries of the project and the responsible of the institutions and collaborators, discussion groups, observation guides…etc. This external evaluation will be realized by experts of this field who are not in touch with the teams of the project and who do not belong to institutions or organizations that are related to it.