Almost a year later, we are back in London.
When we launched our project Stála konferencia slovenských zdravotníkov (Standing Conference of Slovak Healthcare Professionals) at the beginning of the year—implemented under the Recovery and Resilience Plan and financed by EU – NextGenerationEU—our first working meeting was a roundtable at the Slovak Embassy in London. With the participation of our main informal partner, The Association of Slovak Healthcare Professionals in the UK, we planned cooperation around the upcoming events. Symbolically, we also closed our working year in London, reviewing it together with our friends in the UK and agreeing on the coordination of the project’s further activities. So what did we manage to achieve over the year?
In 2025, we delivered a total of 8 events out of the originally approved 16, and one event was subsequently removed by the agency. We started implementing the project in January 2025 despite not having secured its financial coverage. Through our work, we built a strong connection with the association of Slovak healthcare professionals in the United Kingdom (The Association of Slovak Healthcare Professionals in the UK). In addition to our healthcare professionals in the UK, we also involved Slovak healthcare professionals working in the USA, Serbia, the Czech Republic, and France.
On the Slovak side, we actively cooperate with the Ministry of Health of the Slovak Republic (with which we also co-organized one of our events, the “Career and Educational Opportunities Fair”), healthcare providers (e.g., Penta Hospitals, Agel, the University Hospital with Polyclinic Banská Bystrica, and others), representatives of local governments, educational institutions (e.g., the Secondary Medical School in Trnava), as well as professional chambers in healthcare (e.g., the Chamber of Nurses and Midwives).
Since the main staffing challenge in Slovak healthcare is the acute shortage of nurses, we focused as much as possible on this group and sought to bring effective solutions and know-how from our diaspora. We therefore consider it a major success that we established close cooperation with the Slovak Chamber of Nurses and Midwives, evidenced by their invitation to the All-Slovak Conference on Nursing Management, where we had the opportunity to speak actively on the topic of Inclusion and Equal Opportunities together with our main “British” guest, Katarina Morris.
The “pilot” (zero) edition of the Slovak Healthcare Professionals Conference itself also met with great success and interest, with the participation of many renowned figures from Slovakia and abroad. The opportunity to be part of the first edition of Medi-futura is further proof that, despite the short time frame, our project has found a solid place in the healthcare sector and genuinely connects our professional diaspora with Slovakia.
