«A Day Center that will seek to work with people who are mobile enough to develop activities, in order to take advantage of their life experience, and seek to work on exchanged experiences with young people». This is how Paulo Francisco, provider of Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lagoa, describes the new Day Centre, approved under the Recovery and Resilience Plan.
This is an investment of 1 euros that results in the adaptation of the former Hospital da Misericórdia de Lagoa and which will be dimensioned for 240 users. The Day Center will also comprise a living and activities room, a cafeteria, a hairdresser and pedicure office, a temporary accommodation and an interior patio to support the activities room.
The Day Center and Home Support Service is also, according to Paulo Francisco, a pilot project developed by União de Misericórdias with Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Universidade de Coimbra, which will «work with new technologies at a distance, looking for a multidisciplinary team with a structure behind it, which collects all the information through the users' data and which will accompany them in the various stages of their integration process in the institution».
According to the person in charge of Misericórdia, the re-adaptation of the Hospital will also allow the space to be prepared to, in the future, add a Residential Structure for the Elderly (ERPI) to the building.
In addition to «increasing the quality of life and supporting the elderly», this structure will create 40 immediate jobs.
The Lagoa Day Center is just one of the 13 responses approved in the Algarve under the PRR. The last four responses (two aimed at children and two at the elderly) saw their contracts signed on the 7th of September, in Faro, in the presence of Ana Mendes Godinho, mMinister for Labour, Solidarity and Social Security and representatives of the São Barnabé Foundation, Cachopo Parish Center, António Aleixo Foundation and the Municipality of Albufeira.
During the ceremony, the minister also highlighted the importance of signing these contracts that represent “the realization of dreams”.
«These are projects that have been thought of for many years, which had not had the opportunity to have an investment to help with their implementation and now they do. This only shows the dimension of the need that we have in social investment, which was still evident with the pandemic», he continues.
In total, the Recovery and Resilience Plan already represented 13 responses for the Algarve, with 529 intervention sites and almost 10 million euros of public investment.
“We all gained increased legitimacy during the pandemic, when it became evident that there is a need to have more capacity to respond to structural challenges in terms of demography and inequalities and to also be able to respond to what is the natural evolution of the age pyramid: to have more and better answers. for aging and childhood», concluded Ana Mendes Godinho.
Photos: Mariana Sedge | Sul Informação
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