Africa called – from Berlin. As always a great place to visit; this time to attend the Digital Health Africa 2025, organised by/at Charité.

We had the great pleasure of presenting two posters; the first – Women’s Occupational Burnout – on behalf of the EHFF European Health Futures Forum Working Group on Women’s Health, presenting a digital analysis platform to reduce burnout – inspired by WHO Regional Office for Europe SPI-DDH work on this issue.

The second – From Play to Prevention – was the creative spinoff from our recent workshop on AMR at DPH2025 in Madeira where bright minds built this new idea to build antiobiotic awareness, involve schools, and fight AMR across the continents.

Mental health is an urgent issue across every country and society. So it was a great learning experience for us – and both fun, tough, challenging, and rewarding for the professionals and families from Kazakhstan to be able to participate in the 33rd edition of the summer school for phychoanalysis, organised the School of Psychoanalysis in Almaty.

NWA contributed with two lectures and two workshops that allowed the participants to learn more about the psychosomatic symptoms of trauma, about building blocks for creating strategies for mental health and mental health literacy, about emotion-focused therapy individual, group, and organisational practice – and about experiences of improving mental resilience for both frontline workers (of all kinds).

We got to both draw upon work in Europe with both ISRICM-EU about helping vulnerable groups and MentaStress mental training, with WHO Europe and the Strategic Partner’s Initiative for Data and Digital Health on burnout, with ISEFT about professional capacity building – and learned so much about new ways to build mental health literacy in such a diverse group in age, background, history, and more.

We look forward to visit this amazing country and culture again – there are so much to share and combine.

Nordic Wellbeing Academy participated in Digital Public Health 2025 in Madeira, July 24-26, 2025. Three great days of knowledge sharing in an amazing scenery.

Some great results it was:

Award-win!
With Carina Dantas, Miriam Cabrita, and Paloma Moraga, we won an award for Best Student Abstract (as Carina Dantas is current also a PhD student). The abstract revolved around inclusion in digital development and will thus also be developed into a full paper later in 2025.

MyHealth@MyHands sharing
In addition to the abstract win, it was a great chance to get to share more about the work in MyHealth@MyHands to ensure inclusion and diversity for trust.

AMR co-creation
On the basis of our work and collaboration with EHFF, we conducted a co-creative workshop on creative, digital strategies for fighting AMR. The participants found this extremely interesting and we we able to create a joint new concept for gamification to further the use of AMR literacy in educational settings. We look forward to share more about this later.

MentaStress and WHO SPI-DDH connections
Several participants at the conference were working with pandemic preparedness, mental resilience, and/or burnout. Especially the stakeholders from WHO Europe will be really interesting for further work on MentaStress, while several clinical stakeholders were eager to learn more about the use of AI as a management and analysis tool to reduce burnout from the work in the WHO Strategic Partners Initiative for Data and Digital Health.

WHO Wellbeing Policy Pathways
The audience were also quite excited about the new WHO Policy document we had contributed too working with EuroHealthNet and a great consortium of clever partners.

ISRICM-EU
Inclusion and integration was a core part of our presentation and abstract. Many participants therefore also wanted to know more about our recent work in Bucharest about HR guidelines and the combination of digital support tool, training mechanisms for middle managers, and the creation of a supportive and inclusive culture in modern workplaces.

In short – a Magic Madeira for NWA projects and networking.

NWA contributed with great team of experts led by EuroHealthNet to build a new guidance with policy pathways for five key domains for health:

1. Nurturing planet earth and its ecosystems
2. Promoting social protection and welfare systems based on equity, inclusion and solidarity
3. Promoting equitable universal health coverage
4. Equitable economies that serve human development
5. Promoting equitable digital systems

Quote from Preface by WHO Secretary-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

“We need to reform siloed systems and institutions, foster innovation, and ensure that knowledge and resources are shared equitably. This requires individuals and communities to think in truly integrated and creative ways, embracing local wisdom and lived experiences as essential tools for change. Ignoring this imperative is not an option.

To achieve this, we must prioritize a transformative vision: the creation of “well-being societies” – environments where people can reach their full potential, live healthy and fulfilling lives in harmony with nature, and actively contribute to their communities. These societies must be built on key principles:

• Recognizing that well-being goes beyond the absence of disease, and encompasses physical, mental and social well-being.
• Understanding that well-being depends on a complex interplay of social, economic and environmental conditions.
• Embracing a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to decision-making that looks beyond narrow economic metrics.”

Quite an intro to a document with policy advice for

The International Society for Emotion-Focused Therapy is a vibrant community of researchers, educators, coaches, trainers, and – of course – therapists.

The ISEFT 2025 conference in Bucharest was therefore a wonderful mix of practice, theory, exploration, and dialogue. NWA had the pleasure of both presenting our MentaStress project in a session on how to use Erasmus+ for knowledge sharing in EFT – and also conduct a workshop to develop new HR guidelines that integrates an emotional health literate approach to help integration of vulnerable groups – so amazing input for our ISRICM project also.

You can find a copy of the workshop report here. Or join our upcoming webinar September 4, 14 CET to contribute (stay tuned or send us a mail to get direct invite).

The ambitions of the JA PreventNCD project are huge; Finally being able to significantly build the policy frameworks and services that can fundamentally and radically reduce the impact of NCDs in Europe.  As part of these ambitions, the project is building the EU Consortium on NCD Prevention to act as a continuous, ambitious, and cross-sector advisory body for future public health policies in EU.

Recognizing the challenge for maintaining the long term focus on NCDs in a modern political landscape, the intent is to build a body of experts, institutions, and organisations that can help cover this gap. Following the first great meeting in Brussels last year, June 17-18 Lars Münter participated in the EU Polish Presidency event in Katowice to allow NWA help in the co-creation process among the partners – this was a rich experience of both exploring futures, using process design and thinking, and introducing a number of creative steps to support and increase the ideation during the workshops. Read more about the event here.

The goal is (initially) to build a framework of a future-fit structure for the Consortium that ensures trust, inclusion, impact, and sustainability. And of course to also lead to a powerful energy that can lead Europeans toward better health and EU towards a significantly reduced risk and burden from this challenge.

EuroHealthNet is a key European connector of public health actors, innovators, researchers, and entrepreneurs. The annual seminar is a highlight of knowledge sharing for institutions across Europe in their efforts to promote best practices, build future policies, and to navigate shifting political landscapes.

The annual seminar 2025 focused on the impact of climate change on health and health systems. Clearly the many detrimental effects of climate change on animals, oceans, and nature is well known, but the ripple effects on both specific health conditions and by extension of the health systems built to alleviate them is less obvious yet – but the price in human suffering, money, and time is extremely high already and only growing. Read more about the seminar and programme here.

So it was very timely – albeit not exactly encouraging – for NWA to participate in the annual seminar. And very happy for us also to now get the official proof of membership also!

There is a huge potential in exploring the many ways art and artistic practices can be used to create awareness about mental health, support resilience, extend emotional health literacy, treat or reduce symptoms, or be a great bridge in the process towards rehabilitation. NWA once again participated with great enthusiasm in the inspiring Arts & Mental Health Festival on Aegina, Greece.

Organized by the Greek organisation for informal carers EPIONI since 2022, the annual event has managed to gather a core international community of practitioners and innovators that are exploring and documenting these practices.

Lars Münter had the pleasure of delivering an opening speech, highlighting the amazing potential of creative practices not just for mental health, but also for improving knowledge sharing itself, for innovation, for leadership, and for general education too.

Nina Sønderberg also presented her new book “30 Days of Self-Love” at the event and the background and uses for these self-journaling tools for unlocking insights and progress for the user. NWA will further explore this in coming projects and initiatives (and look forward to report on them in Aegina in 2026!).

The International Foundation for Integrated Care is an amazing community for trying cross-sector collaboration and reinventing service design (while studying the process at the same time). NWA had the pleasure of presenting a poster at the 2025 conference event in Lisbon on building a Next Generation Digital Model to support a Salutogenic approach in community care (find it here also).

Co-authored with Eva Turk (UAS St. Pölten), Carina Dantas (SHINE 2Europe), Monika Knudsen Gullslett (Norwegian Centre for E-Health Research), and Gregor Muzak (ZOPS – Slovenian Patients Organisation), the paper focused on how to bridge the possibilities in a digital approach and lived experience with the organizational needs to integrate services.

The event was particularly relevant also in the light of the new MyHealth@MyHands project that intends to build a digital access tool for personal health data for at least 1 mio. Europeans.

The conference in Lisbon gathered hundreds of great experts – it will be a pleasure to participate and hope to reconnect with many in Birmingham in 2026.

The Icelandic government has been a strong supporter of the principles of wellbeing economy for years. Their track record of public health innovation and holistic thinking is second to none. One of the key events and initiatives for this process has been the hosting of the annual Wellbeing Economy Forum in Reykjavik.

NWA participated in a lively and dedicated community of change makers working to implement wellbeing economy at national, regional, or local level – or for imbedding the mindset in research, investment programs, or other frameworks for societal progress.