HBSC team visited Ministry of Education state secretary dr. Peter Krajnak and his colleagues from Teach for Slovakia Lucia Kazimirova and Maria Prekop.

Very inspiring discussion on potential of HBSC survey for various stakeholders including policy makers, frontliners as well as teachers, parents and children was discussed. Moreover the benefits of multi-institutional collaboration was discussed. Last but not least we introduce contribution of our colleagues from departments of physical education in Kosice, Nitra and Banska Bystrica who will join us and add to HBSC survey measuring of antropometric parameters and fitness.

More information from meeting here.

Andrej Belak completed a round of 3 invited lectures in Prague, Czech Republic.

On the 19th of March, he presented an introductory lecture “On trust into people and mistrust towards documentation as a successful provisional strategy” at a workshop of the Czech Association of Social Anthropologists focused on ethics.

The next day, he presented an invited lecture “Biomedicine is not as bad as it used to be” as part of a Master’s Degree course “Anthropology in action” organized by the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University.

Later on in the evening, he closed his Prague gig with a public lecture “On the harmfulness and usefulness of genetics for the Roma”, invited by the alternative club Cross and the Seminar of Romani Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University.

Daniela Filakovska and Andrej Belak have met on 16th of February 2018 with the new appointed director of the WHO office in Bratislava, dr. Tatul Hakobyan, to introduce him into our team’s involvement in the national health research and policy concerning marginalized Roma communities. Dr. Hakobyan has been impressed by our record and offered personal support to and collaboration on all our currently running projects wherever we might find it useful.

Daniela Filakovska and Andrej Belak were on 16th of February 2018 invited by the Government Roma plenipotentiary to discuss the possibilities of enhancing education of healthcare professionals with respect to patients from marginalized Roma communities in the country – a requirement of the latest action plans of the National Roma integration strategy in the area of health on which our team has collaborated. At the meeting, formation of a new expert group has been agreed which will approach this activity systematically in collaboration with our team.

Our team once again hosted Kateřina Paclíková, Msc. from Palacký University in Olomouc, OUSHI since January 19th till 22nd 2018. We continued to intensively collaborate on mapping of care system for children with emotional and behavioral problems as a part of her PhD studies and elaborated first draft of a research paper.

This week (12.-15.2. 2018) our colleagues, Peter Kolarčik and Ivana Skoumalová, attended learning event organized by University of Groningen within the framework of IMPACCT project.

Learning event was aimed to provide necessary knowledge for the project members to enable them to formulate the relevant topics and content of learning units related to health literacy education of medical and nursing students in Europe. Learning units and their content was further discussed and elaborated. Next similar event will focus on finalizing first learning units out of twenty formulated now.

Our colleagues Daniela Filakovska and Andrej Belak participated in the 2nd meeting of the Working Group in Bratislava, which is preparing a unique pilot project for cooperation with hospitals.

The activity is implemented within the framework of the Healthy Community National Project 2A – under the title “Health Assistants in the Hospitals Environment”.

As a result, several meetings with hospital representatives have already been carried out, a description of the work activities, the minimum qualification requirements for this position, the preparation of training activities and many other important details have been agreed.

Our colleagues from University in Groningen, prof. Sijmen Reijneveld and assoc. prof. Jitse van Dijk visited our department on 5-7 February, 2018 to discuss issues related to our long lasting cooperation, ongoing PhD studies and plans for innovative approaches in our runnning projects and collaborations.