EXPERIENCES

This is a project promoted by Madrid Salud, an autonomous body of the Madrid City Council.

The project started in 2008. Under the goal of a "community reorientation" and the motto "from white coats to boots", we embarked on an ambitious process that sought to have our health professionals combine attention to the individual demand that comes to our centers' offices (i.e., the work of "white coats", because of the medical referral associated with this garment), with the exit out of them, to step on the streets and squares of the neighborhoods we serve (work of "boots"), and to meet in this public space with the people and social groups that, despite their needs, frequently encounter barriers to reach our centers (and other social-sanitary, cultural and educational devices). Discrimination between demand and need has therefore been one of the nodes in our learning process.

In Active Communities in Health we did not want to collect ideas, opinions and proposals with which we could later elaborate our own conclusions from a small group. No. We wanted listening to them to be the basis for starting to build a new dynamic of collective dialogue between professionals, neighbours, including those living in poverty, in order to generate a new knowledge of reality that could give rise to more participatory and effective ways of acting. That is why from the beginning we proposed to define together with those involved in the process both the objectives and the actions to be developed and the way to evaluate them. A necessary condition to advance towards the horizon that we had set ourselves: to weave health in our neighborhoods, for all and among all the people who are part of them.

The process has been compiled in this guide: http://madridsalud.es/publicaciones/saludpublica/Guia_Tejiendo_Salud.pdf