Program duration: 01/06/2021 - 31/05/2026
RIVER-EU
RIVER-EU: Reducing Inequalities in Vaccine uptake in the European Region – Engaging Underserved communities
Prolepsis is a partner in the Horizon 2020 project titled RIVER-EU: Reducing Inequalities in Vaccine uptake in the European Region – Engaging Underserved communities. The project started on the 1st of June 2021 and will be implemented over a 5 year period.
Vaccine uptake in most minority or ethnic communities in Europe is substantially and unacceptably lower compared to the general population.
RIVER-EU will improve access to vaccination services for children and adolescents, reducing inequity and improving vaccine uptake of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination and Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccination in underserved communities. RIVER-EU focuses on five underserved communities in four European countries, i.e. communities facing barriers to accessing healthcare because the health systems are often insufficiently responsive to their specific needs and context. These needs and contextual factors can include poverty, language, health illiteracy, social exclusion and social norms that differ from the general population. The selected underserved communities are: (1) the migrant community in Greece (focus on MMR and HPV), (2) the Turkish females and (3) Moroccan females in the Netherlands (focus on HPV), (4) the Ukrainian minority in Poland (focus on MMR and HPV) and (5) the Roma community in Slovakia (focus on HPV). At the same time, enablers to vaccination from three “positive deviants” will be used, i.e. vulnerable communities that achieve high vaccine uptake despite being considered underserved: the Somali community in Finland5, the Arab community in Israel and the Bangladeshi community in the United Kingdom.
The overall aim of the RIVER-EU project is to make access to MMR and HPV vaccination equitable, improving access to these vaccines among underserved communities in Greece, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia by identifying and removing health system barriers. We will do that by adjusting existing and/or developing new system-level interventions tailored to underserved communities and targeting individual or multiple WHO health system building blocks. To that purpose the project takes a co-creative and collaborative approach, where the underserved communities as well as the health care workers providing the health services are given a voice in all phases of the project. By doing so, we ensure that the perspectives and experiences of the communities and the vaccination services are acknowledged and that the current mismatch between health services and communities is repaired. The research project measures uptake based on availability, accessibility, acceptability, quality and cost-effectiveness, and options for scaling up.
The specific scientific objectives of RIVER-EU are:
1. To collect evidence on health system determinants of low vaccine uptake (barriers/obstacles), and high vaccine uptake (enablers/drivers) among underserved communities in Europe. (WP2)
2. To identify promising approaches to improving access to vaccination services among underserved communities in general. (WP2)
3. To tailor interventions to the needs of the selected RIVER-EU underserved communities. (WP3)
4. To implement and evaluate (cost)effectiveness of these tailored interventions in five target communities in four countries. (WP4)
5. To write evidence-based guidelines to address equitable access to vaccination across Europe, based on the lessons learned from the implementation and evaluation of interventions. (WP5)
6. To integrate the lessons learned from WP 2-5 into a sustainable long-term initiative to change behaviour of healthcare professionals around underserved communities. (WP6)
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Coordinator:
University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), Netherlands
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Program Partners:
Prolepsis Institute, Greece
Department of Health (Public Health England), UK
EuroHealthNet, Belgium
Connaxis, Spain
Vienna Vaccine Safety Initiative, Germany
Department of International Health, Care and Public Health Research Institute, University of Maastricht, Netherlands
European Academy of Paediatrics, Belgium
University of Zielona Gora, Poland
Pavol Jozef Safarik University, Slovakia
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK
Bar Ilan University, Israel
Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland
European Public Health Association, Netherlands
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Contact info:
Pania Karnaki, MA: p.karnaki@prolepsis.gr
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Program website: www.river-eu.org
