Hi Franco,
A brief summary of the call with Gemelli this afternoon. We spoke with Dr Luca Liberati (clinical psychologist) and Prof. Daniela Chieffo, who joined partway through.
Regarding your questions:
1. Primary prevention — yes, they have relevant activity. Beyond the hospital-based CBT model they shared in advance, they run a school-based programme called "With You" which has reached around 5,000 young people and adolescents, with an estimated 35,000
indirect beneficiaries (parents, teachers). This is all active work. They also reported strong outcomes: significant reductions in stress indicators and high satisfaction rates. Their philosophy is explicitly holistic and de-medicalised — they bring in arts,
music, and cinema alongside psychoeducation — which seems a good fit for the call.
2. Mental health epidemiology— they have multidisciplinary teams and a link to the Department of Public Health at Cattolica, but we would need to investigate this more.
3. Age range — they work across school, and teenage years to young adulthood.
We made no commitments to including them on the call, but this with you programme sounds interesting – although I am struggling to find documentation of it online, perhaps worth asking Daniela for some - as we could use it as a platform to applying additional
interventions.
Loredana, Giovanna, please add anything I might have missed.
Jack
From: Sassi, Franco <f.sassi@imperial.ac.uk>
Sent: 19 March 2026 15:54
To: zhealth-mgmt <zhealth-mgmt@imperial.ac.uk>
Subject: [Z-health-Mgmt] meeting with Catholic University group
Just thought I would recap quickly what we need to find out from this meeting.
- Do they work on primary prevention of mental health issues in young people? If so, what intervention approaches are they using and where?
- Do they also have expertise in mental health epidemiology in young people, or is there a group within Cattolica that does that?
- What age range do they cover in their work?
If there were relevant interventions already in place in Italy, in which they were involved, we could piggy back on those and think of adding other components of one intervention package.
Alternatively, if you conclude that they have the right expertise and track record, we could have them lead the mental health task in WP3. We could potentially separate the clinical dimensions from the epidemiology, and let them cover
the former.
In any case, I suggest you make no promises at this stage. We need to be sure they would be a good addition. We’ll get back to them after considering the outcomes of the meeting.
Franco