This article is part of a series marking RIVER-EU’s final European Immunisation Week (19–25 April 2026). As we celebrate five years of community-centred research across seven countries, we have been organising satellite community events across partner countries to close the loop ahead of our final conference in Brussels on 19 May. We will be sharing their stories day by day throughout the week.
In the Netherlands, RIVER-EU has been working with Turkish and Moroccan background communities whose HPV vaccine uptake falls consistently below the national average. The project set out to understand why, and to develop and test information sessions and materials that could meaningfully shift that.
This April, RIVER-EU partner and coordinator, University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), brought those findings back to the people who matter most: the professionals who shape the system and the women at its centre.
A conversation with the system
On 2 April, the team hosted a hybrid event at GGD Groningen (the regional Public Health Service) with healthcare professionals, programme managers, policy makers and municipal representatives.
Janine de Zeeuw (UMCG) and Lam Trang (GGD Groningen) presented the project and its results, followed by three health promoters who spoke from their own experience of co-developing and delivering HPV vaccination information sessions with communities.
The discussion that followed was lively and targeted. Questions centred on co-creation: how do you genuinely involve communities in designing health interventions? Participants also asked whether the materials and approaches developed for these two communities could be adapted for other underserved groups.
RIVER-EU has shown that this is possible through a co-creative process that acknowledges that a “one size fits all” approach does not work and interventions need to be tailored to communities’ needs and preferences. More information on RIVER-EU’s participatory transferability analysis.
Hearing it from the women themselves
On the evening of 10 April, the RIVER-EU team once again sat down with the community. At Jasmijn (a multicultural women’s centre in Groningen that has long been a trusted space for women from diverse backgrounds) the team gathered with community members, some of whom had participated in the educational sessions during the project, and some who had not.
During the first hour, key points from the HPV information sessions were revisited; the second hour opened into a conversation about what participants had done differently after attending, how the sessions had felt, what had stuck, and what questions remained.
What comes next
At RIVER-EU’s final conference on 19 May in Brussels, Janine de Zeeuw (UMCG) will represent the Dutch team, and in a “Voices from the Field” session, Salima Ouali, a medical student and community member who served as a health promoter in the project, will share her experience directly with a European audience. On the same day, Dr Marijn Stok from the National Institute for Public Health and Environment of the Netherlands (RIVM) will join a high-level session on opening policy pathways alongside European Commission, UNICEF, and WHO Europe.
Join us on 19 May in Brussels or online for the RIVER-EU final conference!
Agenda and registration: https://river-eu.org/save-the-date-river-eu-closing-events/