"We must move from referring patients to sharing responsibility for care."

Manel meets with his colleagues to review the referrals made by the primary care team. This morning he is accompanied by Dr. Inmaculada Ruiz (psychiatrist) and Cristina Martínez (psychologist). These meetings take place once a week at the Can Vidalet Primary Care Center in Esplugues de Llobregat.

This review allows, initially, not only to understand the case, but also to assess which member of the mental health team will carry out the first assessment visit.

Manel carries out both individual (first visits or assessment or follow-up visits) and group approaches.

In these individual interventions, she attends to people experiencing distress or difficulty managing anxiety, adjustment problems, reactive symptoms to a life situation, or sleep-related problems, for example, who may be at risk of chronicity or frailty. Sometimes, depending on the assessment, she conducts these interventions jointly with another professional from the primary care team or the primary care team itself (doctor, nurse, or social worker).

Group interventions address psychoeducational aspects related to anxiety and its management, insomnia, healthy habits, relaxation techniques, etc.

On some days, the mental health team may make one or more home visits, agreed upon with the EAP (which also accompanies them on occasion) and with the user and their family.

Home visits are part of community intervention and their fundamental objectives are psychopathological assessment, risk detection, environmental analysis, and reintegration of the user into the healthcare network. However, the primary goal is always to obtain more comprehensive and accurate information about the case in order to guide the most appropriate and timely intervention.

In this sense, these community interventions can in some cases be more preventive or psychoeducational: workshops in civic centers, talks on a specific topic in the community for the entire population, participation in days on health or prevention, etc.

Another function of the mental health nurse specialist is to train other professionals, especially those in their own discipline. The number of training sessions per year is usually agreed upon with the primary care center management.

This training should help the primary care center (CAP) to better serve users with mental health needs. The training includes content on mental health conditions, medications and their side effects, role-playing, and other related topics.

In-house training also provides community nursing teams working in primary care centers with more tools and experience to detect clinical conditions related to mental health. Primary care is, in most cases, the entry point where a person's health problem is detected and addressed; therefore, it is essential that the healthcare professionals working there have a solid foundation of training.

Once the visits are completed, the referred cases, especially those of greater complexity or requiring more urgent or critical intervention, will be reviewed jointly with members of the mental health team and the Primary Care Team. These consultations generally take place in the meeting rooms or spaces of the Primary Care Center itself.