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 Slovakia, the RIVER-EU story has always been about one community: marginalised Roma populations, where vaccination rates have historically been among the lowest in the country.
On 18 February 2026, partners from Healthy Regions gathered with Roma health mediators, coordinators and managers to mark the project’s close, not with a formal conference, but with something that felt more fitting: a working celebration.
Healthy Regions is a contributory body under the Slovak Ministry of Health with a network of more than 300 Roma health mediators embedded in communities across the country. Rather than building from scratch, RIVER-EU tapped into this existing infrastructure and worked with and through the mediators who already had the relationships, the language and the trust that no outside intervention could replicate.
The room brought together Roma health mediators who, throughout the project, built relationships door by door in communities where trust in health institutions rarely comes easily. Together, they looked back at what had been achieved: measurable increases in HPV vaccination uptake.
But the event was not only retrospective. Partners used the opportunity to retrain and refresh mediators’ knowledge and communication skills on HPV and HPV vaccination, recognising that the work does not stop when a project ends.
A discussion with Associate Professor Urbancikova, vaccinologist, and Dr Prokopova, Chief Advisor of the Ministry of Health for primary paediatric care, added institutional weight to this gathering. The presence of a Ministry-level voice mattered: it signalled that the work done within RIVER-EU had reached beyond the project itself.
The conversation that mattered most, though, was about what comes next. The knowledge, tools and relationships built over the course of RIVER-EU do not disappear when the project ends. They remain with Healthy Regions, embedded in the organisation and among the people who will continue to show up for these communities long after the project formally ends.
That continuity will be visible in Brussels too. At RIVER-EU’s final conference on 19 May, the Slovak team will be represented by Daniela Bobáková Fiľakovská from Pavol Jozef Safarik University in Košice, and by the coordinator of Roma health mediators, Mr František Turták, who will speak in a dedicated “Voices from the field” session. Because the expertise that matters most in this work does not only live in research papers. It lives in the people who have been doing it, community by community, conversation by conversation.
Join us in Brussels or online on 19 May for the RIVER-EU final conference. Agenda and registration → https://river-eu.org/save-the-date-river-eu-closing-events