Dossier n. 222/2012 [Abstract] Guidelines for the elaboration of the Social Balance of a Health District area

For more than ten years, Municipalities of each Health District area in Emilia-Romagna Region have been integrating the programming of interventions for social policies with health interventions. The document is called “Zone Plan for health and social wellbeing”; it lasts three years but its goals are updated every year. Health Trusts, Public Administrations, and interested profit and no profit subjects can join the Plan.

Many Municipalities decided to account for the outcomes of such programming in the Social Balances - but using inhomogeneous and non standardized formats as for layout and contents. The consequences are that not all Health District areas are described and that information and data that can be retrieved from the documents do not allow a picture at provincial and regional level.

The 2008 Regional Social and Healthcare Plan of Emilia-Romagna extended the sphere of the Social accountability reports of Local Health Trusts also to social programming:

"This document [the Social accountability report] will now include the sphere of social, healthcare and social-health activities, and will have to dynamically understand informative needs of its institutional interlocutors, first of all the Local Social and Healthcare Conference, and of the various stakeholders."

In November 2010 the Regional Control Authority for social and healthcare policies created an ad hoc workgroup to analyse the issue and prepare a proposal. The result is the present report, organized in two parts:

• the first one, in line with a Ministerial Directive of February 2006, describes the contents of the Social Balance;
• the second one identifies a minimum set of indicators that should be considered in all Social Balances, so to allow a comparison of results and programming outcomes at provincial and regional levels.

Beside the theme of accountability, the report introduces also the theme of evaluation, but local experiences are not yet sufficient to draw a proposal.
The Social Balance, which is a different tool from the Social accountability report, allows to consider more the informative and accountability needs of Municipalities’ administrators, mainly to address future programming.