With a budget of 2.5 million euros, the Gaia and Espinho Local Health Unit (ULSGE) has established a new psychiatric inpatient facility which has a total space of 1,750 square meters and can house 38 patients. The project was 100% backed with funds from the Recovery and Resilience Plan for the area of ​​Mental Health.

Rui Guimarães, the chairman of ULSGE's board of directors, believed that enhancing mental health care was a top priority. The Eduardo Santos Silva Hospital in Vila Nova de Gaia, Porto’s district, is home to this new structure. With an open kitchen, a movie theatre, a therapeutic garden, a reading place, a safe smoking area, an office space for individual therapy, and roomy common areas for group psychotherapy, the facility is ready for both therapeutic and everyday activities.

As mentioned by ULSGE in a statement “the new hospital was built in order to provide a more humanised intervention model, within the scope of mental health, with a total focus on the recovery and improvement of hospitalised patients”. Additionally, Rui Guimarães emphasised that “Mental health is now, fortunately, something more visible and less stigmatised”, adding that “This unit also allows for better management of the type of intervention to be carried out, depending on the greater or lesser severity of the cases, that is, applying therapies in proximity, where often the best solution does not involve hospitalisation”.

Additionally, the press release quotes Georgina Lapa, director of the Psychiatry Service at ULSGE, as saying, "We are able to offer a better response to complex patients, in an integrative and multidisciplinary approach in a humanised, safe environment that promotes autonomy and quality of life."