University of Jaén professor Luis Joaquín García and researcher Jesús Sánchez met with Henka director Ester Camprodon and Zurich Insurance Project Managers Anna Torres and Sonia González to present projects such as PROCARE, PROADEMO, Digitas and the roadmap for 2025 of the PROEMO Network.
16/7/2024.- Luis Joaquín García, professor at the University of Jaén (UJA) and head of the Network for the Promotion of Health and Emotional Wellbeing of Adolescents (PROEMO), and Jesús Sánchez, researcher at UJA, held a working meeting with Ester Camprodon, psychologist at the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu Barcelona and Director of the Henka program, and Anna Torres and Sonia González, both members of the Corporate Responsibility Project Manager team at Zurich Seguros.
The aim of the meeting was to share the different projects related to the health and emotional well-being of young people carried out by these entities, linked by the Princess of Girona Foundation, which is part of the External Advisory Council of the PROEMO Network, collaborates in the Henka program and has Zurich Seguros as one of its patrons.
In this regard, Luis Joaquín García presented several of the initiatives under the umbrella of the PROEMO Network (RED2022-134247-T funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 (Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the State Research Agency). These include the PROCARE, PROADEMO and Digitas initiatives, as well as the 2025 roadmap project.
In this way, the main responsible of the PROEMO Network explained the keys of PROCARE (‘Selective prevention through a transdiagnostic intervention for adolescents at risk of emotional problems’), a pioneering initiative worldwide in the field of prevention and personalized medicine, since it is the first selective prevention program aimed at adolescents between 12 and 18 years old at risk of suffering emotional problems.
PROCARE is an R+D+i project PID 2019-111138RB-I00 funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 (Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the State Research Agency), with the participation of professionals from the Psychology Department of the UJA, the Rovira i Virgili University, the Miguel Hernández University of Elche and the University of Miami (USA).
In turn, he delved into the materials being generated within the framework of the PROADEMO project (‘PROmocionAnDo la salud y el bienestar EMOcional de los adolescentes en el sector educativo, sanitario y la sociedad’), focused on becoming useful tools for educational, health and youth information personnel, as well as for the adolescents themselves, with the aim of improving the quality of the services offered in the field of adolescent emotional wellbeing and increasing emotional literacy. PROADEMO is a project PDC2022-133401-I00 funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 (Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the State Research Agency and the European Union through the “Next Generation EU” funds within the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan).
Finally, he addressed both the resources made available by the Digitas project, which seeks to promote literacy in adolescent mental health through the creation of videos, podcasts or sound fiction documentaries, among other tools; and the 2025 roadmap of the PROEMO Network, aimed at detecting current gaps and providing new recommendations on child and adolescent health.
Henka is a universal prevention program that promotes emotional wellbeing, with actions that reinforce resilience to prevent the appearance of mental health problems in adolescents and young people between the ages of 12 and 25 and their environment: schools, their families and society.
Specifically, one of the main objectives of Henka is to increase the resilience of adolescents and young people as a tool for improving mental health, intervening in this population, families, educational centers and the social and cultural environment. In this way, more than 1,700 students from 120 educational centers in nine autonomous communities in Spain and around 200 professionals from the educational field are already part of the program, promoted by the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, Z Zurich Foundation and Zurich Insurance.
In this regard, Ester Camprodon emphasized that “the work of the PROEMO Network and its projects are in line with the HENKA program because there is a problem of a lack of precision medicine in Spain. When it comes to mental health, we have the obligation and responsibility to find evidence and add value”. Meanwhile, both Anna Torres and Sonia Gonzalez expressed interest in evaluating the establishment of possible synergies between working groups that address similar issues and target audiences: the health and emotional well-being of young people.
