From 21 till 23 November 2024 our colleague Peter Kolarčik attended the international conference organized by Polish Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Society and Slovak CF association. As a reminder of the CF patient salty skin, the typical symptom of CF, first day of the conference took place in Wielicska salt mine and was focused on international collaborations among CF centers and twinning project connections. Second day of the conference was dedicated to invited experts’ presentations and the discussions with them. Dr. Kolarcik used this opportunity to emphasize the importance of health literacy for CF patients and to broaden his professional network with new contacts in the field of CF patients quality of life. He also discussed his potential involvement as a methodological support for the planned CF patient well-being survey (TIDES 2.0 project).

International DIPEx community organized very fruitful online meeting on November 20th to share the experiences of their member countries in innovating DIPEx this year.

Inspiring presentations covered topics like:

• working with university students on DIPEx
• engaging arts students in DIPEx
• updating DIPEx modules
• collaborating with AI researchers on DIPEx research
• developing experienced-based interventions based on DIPEx
• teaching with DIPEx
• arts-based knowledge translation of DIPEx
• visual storytelling in DIPEx

From 11 to 15 November 2024, our colleagues Daniela Fiľakovská, Jana Marošníková, Ivana Borysová and Emília Gajdošová met with other prominent researchers in the field of public health at the 17th annual European Public Health Conference and the consortium meeting of H2020 RIVER-EU project in Lisbon, Portugal.

Consortium meeting dialogues concentrated on implementing interventions to increase vaccine uptake in underserved communities and the ways forward. Together with colleagues from the RIVER-EU, AcToVax4NAM, and RISE-Vac projects, we organised a full-day pre-conference workshop titled “From Insight to Impact: Advancing Equitable Vaccination across Europe.” During the main conference, Daniela presented an intervention implemented in Slovakia within the RIVER-EU project at another workshop, “Transferability and adaptation of vaccination interventions: Learning from underserved communities.”

In August 2024, we finished interviewing patients with narcolepsy. These interviews were conducted in patients’ homes, at a neurological outpatient clinic or clinic, and online. We had the opportunity to speak with 25 patients suffering from this very rare neurological sleep disorder. In Slovakia, only around 80 people suffer from this disease. We have managed to understand the nature of excessive daytime sleepiness, cataplexy or parasomnias, such as hallucinations, sleep paralysis or automatic behaviour. We also gained a closer understanding of the seriousness of the impact of this disease on the patients’ daily, work, personal and family life.

These interviews will be part of the module on narcolepsy from the patient’s point of view for DIPEx Slovakia and should be available in August 2025 on the website http://www.rozhovoryozdravi.sk.

These interviews were conducted by a researcher from the Faculty of Medicine of P.J. University. Šafárik and at the same time PhD student of Comenius University Ján Hlodák.

In October 2024, the last 4 interviews were conducted with patients who visit the dialysis center in the south-west of Slovakia.

The interviews took place in the patients’ homes and brought us valuable knowledge of people with kidney diseases with regard to their experiences with the onset and course of the disease, dialysis and the health care provided to them in Slovakia. The interviews are currently being analyzed and will be used together with audiovisual recordings as part of a module on the website http://www.rozhovoryozdravi.sk, which covers the experiences of patients in various areas of common and rare diseases, mental problems or specific physiological conditions.

Interviews were conducted all over Slovakia by our collegues psychotherapist and researcher Ivana Skoumalová and the final interviews took place under the guidance of Ján Hlodák together with the help of our new PhD student Ľubica Pamulová.

From November 7th to 8th 2024, an online international autumn meeting is taking place within the international network of the Health Behavior in School-Aged Children study.

This international meeting offers 167 participants from 47 countries the opportunity to get to know each other better, share knowledge, ideas and inspiration in the field of health and health-related behavior of schoolchildren.

Several researchers meet here in focus groups where participants can discuss the general work strategy, action plan and details to be added or modified in the HBSC research. The main objective of this meeting is to bring network members together to discuss other HBSC research, international reports, forthcoming publications and preparations for the HBSC 2025/26 protocol.

Aurel completed his second visit to Linköping University as part of his activities under the FORTE visiting researcher grant. During his visit from November 2nd to 8th, he attended meetings with members of the EHealth Strategic Research Group and discussed current and future collaboration opportunities in the development and implementation of digital health tools for Slovak patient populations.

He also attended the public PhD defense of Dr. Andreas Blomqvist, which focused on physical activity in people with heart failure and how novel digital tools could enhance assessment and intervention practices in this field.

Prof. Andrea Madarasova Geckova was invited for a lecture on the phenomenon of second victims at the 37th World Congress of Internal Medicine in Prague (October 30th – November 2nd 2024).

During her lacture she mentioned: “They choose medicine because they want to witness the miracle of healing, they want to contribute to it. Unfortunately, there are days when things don’t go as planned, mistakes happen, the patient’s condition worsens instead of getting better, they have to communicate bad news, and they have to deal with emotionally demanding situations. Supporting the resilience of health workers, psychological safety in the workplace as well as peer support are areas where psychology can make a significant contribution.”

From 9 till 11 October 2024 our colleague Peter Kolarčik visited the annual congress organised by Czech and Slovak associations of allergology and clinical immunology at the invitation of doc. MUDr. Norbert Lukán, PhD. He used this opportunity to broaden his professional network with new contacts in the field of allergy research and the quality of life of allergic patients. He also presented a poster introducing his work collaboration with Doc. MUDr. Norbert Lukán, PhD., and his team focused on assessing respiratory symptoms in allergic patients using a special scale (UAD-9), and its variation was adjusted for smartphone administration.

From 3 till 6 September 2024, our colleagues Andrea Madarasová Gecková, Daniela Fiľakovská, Daniela Husárová, Jaroslava Kopčáková, Ján Hlodák, Jana Plavnická and Zuzana Dankulincová met with other prominent researchers in the field of health psychology on the 38th annual conference of European Health Psychology Society in Cascais, Portugal.

They were invited to share their knowledge via poster presentations on latest findings from HBSC, RomaReach, RIVER and Care4Youth studies as well as our experience from using DIPEx modules in university education.