In recent years, awareness of emotional and mental health has increased. Even in healthcare, in line with the Vision of the National Prevention Plan 2023-2025, there is growing interest in integrated and alternative medicine practices as part of developing a healthcare policy focused on activating a clinical algorithm to promote awareness of mental health and psychological well-being.

Providing support for caregivers seems crucial for effective patient management.

Promoting wellness and managing stress are essential themes in mental health and therapeutic relationships. It’s about fostering competence within a caring psychology that evolves into a helping relationship, supported by healthcare management and aimed at meeting the health needs of those who provide care.

From this perspective, our task is to offer best practices to promote a work-related stress culture and a range of self-protection devices and interventions for managing emotional and somatized stress. We’re talking about integrated and preventive medicine devices that take the form of individual and organizational interventions.

At the individual level, a primary tool for managing emotional stress and enhancing the well-being of healthcare workers is Balint groups. The group setting provides a space to expand the window of tolerance for stress and frustration by sharing emotional content and cognitive and relational experiences that help maintain healthy functioning. According to Balint’s theoretical model, the group becomes a space for psycho-emotional support and care for personal or team work-related distress.

A second intervention tool involves staff support focus groups as a supervision space for small work groups of up to eight members who face particularly stressful or risky situations. The activities resemble a psychological debriefing aimed at reducing emotional burden related to the experience and preventing post-traumatic reactions, while also identifying effective coping strategies.

The third intervention tool, which focuses more on the organizational level, involves creating focus groups to share perceptions of emotional overload, management ambiguity from above, and control over time management. In the phases of an intervention protocol, we add periodic meetings to report sentinel events or changes in contextual or content factors that may require intervention (such as excessive overtime hours, heightened conflict, etc.), as well as to observe changes in safety behaviours. Alongside lab training groups, which serve as experiential laboratories and spaces to teach strategies and tools for professional excellence (self-empowerment), these are designed to help refine response-ability—the capacity to respond calmly and effectively rather than react with outdated defensive mechanisms like attack, flight, or helplessness. The goal is to activate the ‘high road,” typical of operators capable of implementing functional and contextually appropriate coping strategies. Teamwork is fundamental in healthcare: ensuring patients receive proper care often requires doctors, healthcare workers, nurses, and sometimes specialists from other facilities to communicate, share essential information, and combine their skills to provide access to the best possible care for as many people as possible.

Team building involves activities conducted inside or outside the workplace that actively engage all employees or a specific group. The goal is to develop relationships among participants and enhance each person’s soft skills. From a business viewpoint, especially for healthcare facilities, the aim is to improve communication among team members, foster mutual understanding, and promote cooperation to solve problems or handle unexpected situations.

Beyond entertainment and relationship aspects, many studies have shown that team-building activities positively influence the facility’s development. A more united team is more productive and motivated, benefiting not only the clinic’s organization but also all patients.

The goal of the helping relationship, which underpins our project proposal for caring for caregivers, is to support caregivers’ well-being by creating a “cradle environment” that embodies the gesture of care, a gesture psychoanalytic literature associates with the sixth sense: the embrace.

The embrace enables three therapeutic actions: holding, supporting, and containing. This represents the highest form of care in a healthcare setting, functioning as a cradle environment.