These days our new website, dedicated to one of our research projects Health Behaviour in School-aged children study, was oficially launched as a part of the preparation for upcoming data collection in May and June.

Visit our new website www.hbscslovakia.com!!!

Our team once again hosted Kateřina Paclíková, Msc. from Palacký University in Olomouc, OUSHI since January 22nd till 25th 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.

Our colleagues Andrej Belák and Daniela Fiľakovská were recently invited  (7.1.2018 and 15.1.2018) by the State Secretary from Ministry of Health – prof. Stanislav Špánik as well as by the Government Plenipotentiary for Roma Communities – Ábel Ravasz to attend important meetings concerning deduction of the accomplished and planned activities of the Action Plan of the Slovak Republic’s Strategy for Roma Inclusion in the field of Health and its upcoming revision. Cooperation of the Department of Health Psychology on these activities as well as on the revision of Strategy for Roma Inclusion was negotiated.

Department of Health Psychology, Faculty of Medicine, PJ Šafárik university will organize on 23. 1. 2018 invited lecture by dr. Danielle E. M. C. Jansen from University of Groningen, The Netherlands on the topic “What does it mean to be an adolescent from multi-problem family?”.

Dr. Danielle Jansen is appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community and Occupational Medicine, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, and in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen.

Her current research focuses on the early detection and early treatment of psychosocial problems and on participation of youth with psychosocial problems. A second focus of her research is healthcare utilization of vulnerable groups in various settings (e.g. adolescents with emotional and behaviour problems and adolescents involved in bullying).

Thesis cover of our colleague Daniela Husarova “Barriers to active participation of school-aged children”, prepared by Michal Dankulinec, awarded best cover of second half of 2017 by SHARE Research Institute in Groningen, The Netherlands. Congratulations to both!

The Rom-H-Quest proposal “Development and introduction of a tool for health-needs assessment and evaluation of health interventions in marginalized Roma communities” for APVV had been submitted in collaboration with our partners at Institute of Ethnology of SAS.

Like elsewhere in the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the real positive impacts of investments and interventions tackling the gap between marginalized Roma communities (MRCs) and the general population in Slovakia remain largely questionable. Where known, the positive impacts are usually rather small and unsustainable in the long run. The ambiguity of the impact of interventions is mainly due to the absence of accurate measurements and evaluations of the effects of specific intervention activities. The small and short term positive effects of interventions are mainly related to the low appropriateness of the interventions due to the generally poor (too imprecise, unreliable, narrow, paternalistic and impractical) assessments of the initial situations, needs and possibilities of the target communities, and to similarly superficial methodologies for creating interventions themselves on the basis of such assessments.

Our interdisciplinary research team, consisting of social-science experts on MRCs from the Institute of Ethnology of SAS and Roma-health experts from UPJŠ Medical Faculty, intends to develop and assist the introduction of a methodical instrument into a specific intervention practice aimed at improving the health situation in MRCs, i.e. an instrument suitable for a comprehensive, rigorous, participative and practical health-needs assessment, and at the same time for an unambiguous evaluation of the impact of health interventions in MRCs. We intend to develop and mediate the instrument specifically for the National Project Healthy Communities (HC), currently implemented by the Healthy Regions, a contributory organization of the Slovak Ministry of Health.

Our methodology is based primarily on an original interdisciplinary synergy, drawing on different approaches and experiences of experts from different fields, fashioning an immediately applicable instrument through and on the basis of an intensive joint field research. The outputs of the proposed research project would enable the HC management to perform a health-needs assessment using its own, unprecedentedly high-quality tool, developed purely on an expert, non-commercial basis and using an innovative transdisciplinary approach. At the same time, our project would present an attractive example of how analogous situations of the absence of adequate methodology can be dealt with more precisely elsewhere in the context of CEE.

Our colleagues Daniela Fiľakovská, Peter Kolarčik, Lucia Bosáková and Laura Urbanová participated in the 3rd year of the Czech-Slovak scientific conference QUALITY OF LIFE 2017 entitled “Quality of Life in the Context of Poverty”, which took place on 7th and 8th of December 2017 in Prešov.

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Our team once again hosted Kateřina Paclíková, Msc. from Palacký University in Olomouc, OUSHI since December 4th till 7th 2017. We intensively collaborate on mapping of care system for children with emotional and behavioral problems as a part of her PhD studies.