We spent the Thursday workshop by gathering opportunities and good practices of working together. For IP collaboration, it is necessary to work together on finding out what it could / should be done in a given concrete case to plan joint work together and decide on further interventions to keep in touch and to meet each other regularly, where we re-evaluate events and analyze each other’s experiences. A long-term, complex, continuous team-work is our model which leads to IP collaboration, a long-term project for designing and implementing a service concept. In that project we set a new goal that will result a new quality of collaboration. The ideas and debates emerging during the design period will strengthen the collaborative team members in order to work more efficient for the common goals with our potential new partners; or to avoid overcoming professional problems and difficulties (paternalism, prejudice, scapegoat, routine).
In connection to all of this, two concrete good practices were mentioned by our participants. In Slovakia, inter-professional care teams were set up to look after the elderly in their own homes. They also set up integrated mental health teams consisted by different professionals for people suffering in persistent mental illness. In that joint task, traditional social work roles became blurred as nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, teachers and other professionals work together. In Romania, a very good practice has emerged in dealing with young people with difficult education needs – educators, sport trainers and social professionals decided to start a collaboration.