VII.- PROFESSIONAL AUTONOMY AND RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER PROFESSIONALS

Any activity consolidated as a profession fulfills social utility elementary requirements such as:

Offering solutions in specific intervention fields

Having a technologic - scientific background supporting intervention quality and rigour.

Satisfying social demands

If we match these requirements with what was said about Clinical and Health Psychology in the former pages and we keep in mind the bio-psycho-social concept of the intervention stated by HWO, we should reach the conclusion that Clinical and Health Psychologists can claim any area related with health as their own intervention field in cooperation with other professionals.

This broader concept of health banishes social prejudices which frame clinical and health psychologists' activity in the "mental" world and harms the users, because what is offered to them is a dichotomic and split concept of health, where physical and mental sides are not connected to study and intervention even though both sides are not separable.

Clearly, breaking this useless dualism involves an important challenge to any health professional and favours clinical and health psychologist direct interventions on bio-medical problems: pain, cardio - vascular diseases, hypertension, AIDS, etc., such as it was mentioned above.

A close relationship between people's behavior and their health state is becoming more and more evident. Clinical and Health Psychologists' intervention field is there, analysing and changing person - environment interactions with interventions directed to improve and look after health through its different levels by means of searching bio-psycho-social wellfare in each person, using the appropriate analysis to the case and being assisted by other complementary interventions when they are considered convenient by Clinical and Health Psychologist.

It is well known that clinical and health psychologist's professional aptitudes can provide valuable elements to improve people's health in cooperation with other professionals. Nowadays, there is a very important amount of psychologists working in all different levels (national, regional and local) of public health system, being the PIR (an State Internship Program to train clinical and health psychologists interested in reaching specialist degree) a good sign of it. The presence in the private practice of clinical and health psychologists with high quality levels and a broad diversity of increasingly growing services is also very important

All these facts bring about a currently greater social demand of the profession and are one of the reasons to make this document, and provide it with a meaning.

Concerning the relationships of clinical and health psychologists with other health professionals, we consider that this topic has to be framed in the scope of a permanent cooperation inside of multidisciplinary teams where each professional provides his/her own point of view in order to give an integral care to people's health. This scope is not a desire but a reality put into practice in Promotion Health Centres, Mental Health Centres, etc. where it is possible even to see psychologists as team or centre managers or coordinators. Thereby, clinical and health psychologist's role will become so much leading as some aspects of the health - disease continuum related with the interaction between the person and herself, the others, and the world are kept in mind.

As an example, we could say that clinical and health psychologist's intervention field is more frequently the Primary Care Service -doing health prevention and promotion tasks, treating behavioral problems inside of specialized services- more than the surgery service, but we must not exclude the psychologist's intervention in this area, where psychological advise and support is provided.

Clinical and Health Psychologists should know and permanently update their knowledge about Health Sociology, Epidemiology of behavioral disorders, Anthropology, etc. as a necessary support to their daily work.

Everything mentioned above could be summarized by saying that it is about time to pay attention and give satisfaction to citizens' requests so far disregarded.