Health care
Caring for each other
Prevention of stress and burn-outs
Push, push, push. That is what we have done and what we truly believe should be continued to be done to address the prevention of stress and burn-outs, especially with the covid pandemic. Youth and young adults are mentally suffering under enormous pressure from seemingly helpless situations. Due to the outbreak of the virus, many have been robbed of normal education and essential social contact in their puberty, and yet, they will still have to deal with the doom and gloom that was already thrown around before the pandemic struck: no prospects for an affordable home, a generation with crippling student debts, and the constant expectation that everyone has to be number one. At Connect we believe that if we connect early to those among us whom start to fall into a downward mental spiral, that we can save them many years of silent suffering and recovery. In the past 4 years we kept pressing the importance of this topic and break the taboo surrounding it. As a result, resolutions that we filed motivated the mayor to spread jars with anti-stress advice through the inner city and the alderman keeps insisting in the region to include a clause for work enjoyment within the region’s economic plan.
Priorities
- Prevention of stress and burn-outs
- Remain a social city
- Provide proper care for our civilians
- Open a GGD center in Wageningen
- Ward off loneliness
Context
Connect Wageningen believes that everyone has the right to obtain social support from the municipality. Our municipality provides a lot for its citizens, outperforming the averages in many key figures related to health. Therefore, aside of our priorities, we only have to stay on guard for introducing too many new ideas and plans of which the effectiveness is uncertain.
In Wageningen, 40 of the 95 million budget is spend on health, which is about 42% of the total. This is an enormous sum and our plans do not intend to deviate from this amount.
Priorities in detail
Use a text section to describe your values, show more info, summarize a topic, or tell a story. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore.Remain a social city
At Connect Wageningen, we agree that attention for civilians whom need extra support is very important. Luckily for them, our city is a very social city and deemed one of the ‘golden cities’ on the field of social policies. Wageningen has not cut on these policies in the past four years, which caused the costs of these policies to increase to 49,1 million, or about half of the total municipality’s budget. The social budget is slowly taking over the entire budget, thanks to the national government that dumped their responsibilities on the municipalities while simultaneously cutting the original budgets. We believe that we should take a critical look at how we spend this budget and will ask for an independent ‘no cure, no pay’ consult. We believe that the finances within this budget should become more transparent and comprehensible, because at this point, not even our councilors know where the money goes. Without this knowledge, how can we keep condoning the huge sum spend within this domain? At this point, social policies are executed without them even being very social.
Provide proper care for our civilians
Ensure proper care at the forefront, not only when civilians end-up inside aid programs. Civil servants and the municipality are engulfed by legislative paper and if the paper says that you are not sick enough, they will not be allowed to help you. Connect Wageningen believes that social care can be done more efficient with a focus on preventing rather than curing. Proper support should be available, with no payments or other surprises afterwards.
Open a GGD center in Wageningen
We want to expand the health care network of Wageningen by inviting an GGD center. Such a center provides the option for our citizens to check for STDs, get vaccinated or donate blood in town, removing a tedious trip to Ede. Donating half a liter of blood and then having to cycle 6 to 10 kilometers back to Wageningen is irresponsible. Furthermore, we believe that we can make more accessible and remove hurdles for our citizens to get advice for healthy diets, stress, burn-outs, substance (ab)use, and repetitive strain injuries.
Ward off loneliness
To no one’s surprise, new studies show that international students suffer especially from the isolation of to the pandemic. Without a strong social network and far away from home, most are suffering from stress, loneliness and mental issues. Almost one forth of the students interviewed have expressed few or no feelings of joy in the last academic year. Pressure to perform well in their studies and isolation through continued lockdowns, have backed them into a corner. Likely one that’s old, tiny, 15 floors high and with a ludicrous rent. Meeting and connecting with new people has been shown to be tough, so extra attention should be given to these civilians to involve them in our community.
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