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Toolbox: Community-oriented and remote psychosocial support during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Países
Venezuela
Fuentes
HelpAge
Fecha de publicación

Introduction

The experience of the humanitarian psychosocial support program of the project implemented by ConviteHelpAge-Doctors of the World in the Capital District and Miranda in Venezuela between July 2020 and May 2021, dates back to 2019. It began in a meeting held in Bogotá between Convite AC and HelpAge during a presentation made to different humanitarian agencies in which the results of a survey of assistance needs previously carried out in Venezuela were shown. The seriousness of the results obtained made it necessary to build a humanitarian response and we began to develop it.

When formulating this project, we wanted to go a little further than merely provide assistance, and we began to think about how to make older adults themselves more than passive recipients of aid. We thought it would be a great idea to turn them into potential caregivers. It is there that we saw in the figure of peers or senior volunteers, a seam of opportunity to provide basic psychosocial assistance to others in need.

The implementation involved an initial recruitment of volunteers and their subsequent training in psychological first aid and accompaniment. This process represented a significant challenge since it had to be totally remote due to the pandemic and because the first volunteers were older people who had a significant technological lag in handling e-learning tools. However, we managed to overcome this obstacle and turned it into a technology training opportunity.
Once trained, the 120 volunteers began to provide telephone assistance to 640 older people who received calls daily. The objective of such calls was to identify risk factors, to know the state of physical and emotional health, to remind them their medical prescriptions or simply to say hello.

This initiative was successful in terms of the positive assessment of the recipients of the aid, but also in terms of the perception of those providing the it, who felt taken into account and involved in the humanitarian work.

Today we can say that there is a team of older volunteers capable of providing humanitarian assistance in their communities. This is a great added value delivered by the project, beyond the assistance it provided.

Luis Francisco Cabezas
General Director Convite, A.C.
HelpAge International Representative for Venezuela