The objective of the We start young project is to support the families of haemophilic children. A female family intermediary works with the parents from the time of diagnosis – often a traumatic moment – and through the child's early years. After an initial meeting at the Hemophilia Centre with the doctor present, the family intermediary can visit the home of each family, where her contribution will develop over time based on the family's needs as they arise. It will be her job to inform the family regularly about the practical aspects of the care and the life of the haemophilic child, as well as helping all those involved to tap into their own experiences and their own resources. This early intervention can help those directly involved to build a harmonious relationship with the disease and accept it as a fact of life, limiting fears and anxieties that are often unwarranted. This will make it possible to avoid not only the situation where the fate of the entire immediate family revolves around the illness of one of its members, but also the risks of suppression and denial – defence mechanisms that present an impediment to facing the problem with the necessary awareness. For all these reasons, working in the first place with the parents of the haemophilic child becomes crucial for him: only they can transmit to him a balanced view of his condition that will be fundamental to his life as an adult haemophiliac.
The project is supported by Bayer, CSL Behring, Pfizer and Takeda.
Since the beginning of the project our intermediaries have supported 80 families (April 2022).
We start young operates under the scientific supervision of the psychologist and psychotherapist Dr Cristina Mazzini, who heads an adult disability unit of the local health centre (ULSS) in Padua and is a lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine at Padua University.
Fondazione Paracelso identifies and selects its family intermediaries from a national register, thus guaranteeing the highest quality assistance anywhere in Italy. All the intermediaries, Cristina Mazzini, and Fondazione Paracelso meet periodically to compare notes and to encourage comments and shared strategies that will benefit from the skills of each member of the working group.
To date, the project is active in Bari, Bologna, Catania, Cesena, Florence, Genoa, Lecce, Macerata, Milan, Naples, Padua, Palermo, Perugia, Rome and Turin.
