This page serves as a central repository for resources, guidance, and evidence-based findings produced by the RIVER-EU project. Here, public health stakeholders can access step-by-step implementation frameworks, peer-reviewed publications, video summaries, and multilingual educational materials designed to reduce health system barriers and improve MMR and HPV vaccine uptake in underserved communities.
Uptake for routine vaccines in most minority groups across Europe is substantially lower compared to the general population. This inequity is largely preventable. Minority groups across Europe are likely to encounter health system barriers to accessing healthcare services, which are a major contributor to comparatively low vaccine uptake in these groups.
About RIVER-EU
RIVER-EU (Reducing Inequalities in Vaccine uptake in the European Region – Engaging Underserved communities) worked to improve access to vaccination services for children and adolescents in selected underserved communities, specifically aiming to reduce inequity in measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) and human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines.
In a process of co-creation, RIVER-EU worked with eight target communities over the course of the 5-year project to better understand what health systems barriers are in underserved communities, how they can be overcome, and most importantly, how lessons from one context can be adapted to another context to effectively address systems barriers to vaccination in any underserved group.
Among the eight communities involved in RIVER-EU, three communities were “empowering examples” due to their high vaccination coverage rates against either MMR or HPV despite their socio-economic status. These communities were:
- The Somali Community in Finland (focus on MMR)
- The Arab community in Israel (focus on MMR and HPV)
- The Bangladeshi community in the United Kingdom (focus on childhood vaccination)
In the remaining five communities a process of co-creation led to interventions that were implemented and sginificantly improved intention to vaccinate. These communities were:
- The migrant and refugee community in Greece (with a focus on MMR and HPV vaccines)
- Turkish adolescent females in the Netherlands (focus on HPV)
- Moroccan adolescent females in the Netherlands (focus on HPV)
- The Ukrainian migrant community in Poland (focus on MMR and HPV)
- The marginalised Roma community in Slovakia (focus on HPV)
Key outputs
The central output of RIVER EU is guidelines that will help pubic healht stakeholders at the local, regional and national level to adapt and transfer existing evidence into an intervention tailored to their particular context and communities, with a focus on Deep engagement and co-creation with these communities. This guidance ha sbeen specifically designed to complement existing guidance on developping interventions that aim to improve vaccination equity. To facilitate the usability of RIVER-EU guidance a step-by step action framework guides the user to make best posible use of it.
In addition to the guidance, RIVER EU has produced a range of additional outputs that can be found on this page and Will be useful to immunisation programme stakeholders aiming to improve the equity of their programme and encourage undervaccinated communities to improve uptake. These outputs include
- A series of videos summarizing the learnings and experience accumulated during the 5 years of RIVER-EU
- A series of peer-reviewd publications describing the findings
- A series of education materials co-created in several languages relavant to the RIVER-EU communities, which can be adapted, translated and re-used.