As part of the MentaStress project, NWA visited Greater Copenhagen Fire Departmentin April 2025 and learned more about their history, transformational journey, and current landscape of psychosocial support. MentaStress aims to enhance mental health and stress management for first responders through augmented reality (AR) training.

More recently, NWA Senior Communication Advisor, Anna Gallinat, had the chance to interview Christian Hagelund Vangsgaard, firefighter and crew commander in Copenhagen, who is driving the change for more mental resilience on the job. 

In 2017, tragedy struck at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, when a terrorist attack killed 22 people and injured over 1,000. While the headlines focused on the victims and the perpetrator, a lesser-known aftermath unfolded quietly within the emergency services. A crew of firefighters called to the scene were denied entry due to misinformation and security protocols. Treated as an active shooter situation, the incident led police to hold back the fire crew – a decision that had deep psychological consequences.

“Not being allowed to do your job is one of the key factors for developing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is what happened there,” explains Christian Hagelund Vangsgaard, Crew Commander for the Greater Copenhagen Fire Department.

Around 10 years ago, the Department started recognising that large-scale security incidents like terror attacks were no longer remote possibilities but real threats. Greater Copenhagen’s fire service launched a new wave of training programmes, which aimed not only at technical readiness but also at mental resilience.

The training initiative was spearheaded by Christian and his colleague Andreas Corell, who believed that modern emergency response demanded a new mindset. Firefighters were trained to handle high-stress, high-risk environments as well as how to process the psychological impact of those events. The goal: to prevent PTSD by addressing its root causes – lack of preparedness and the inability to act.

The biggest challenge wasn’t the technical component. It was changing a deeply ingrained culture. According to Christian: “The biggest part was not the technical preparation, like how to do a special kind of first aid. It was to change the mindset that these incidents are dangerous in a different way and that mental preparedness as well as resilience are big parts of it.”

In a traditionally stoic and physically demanding profession, change isn’t easy. The fire service, like many emergency organisations, has long been steeped in a culture that rewards toughness and discourages vulnerability.

  “Culture is a difficult thing to change, but not impossible.”

Christian Hagelund Vangsgaard

To shift the mindset, Christian began with leadership – his own. After each emergency call, his team holds a debrief. These start with a discussion of technical actions, but in more significant situations, they also include mental and psychological evaluations. As crew commander, Christian leads by example: “I feel it is my responsibility to set an example, not just on the technical side of a call, but also on the mental aspects of the job.” He usually begins by sharing how a particular incident affected him emotionally, which encourages others to do the same.

“We all get affected by something at some point in different ways. And it’s okay to get emotionally affected, because we’re not made of stone. We are whole human beings, not machines.”

Today, the Greater Copenhagen Fire Department includes mental resilience as a key part of its operating model. “The more you talk about it, the more you normalize it,” says Christian. His leadership has helped foster a culture that embraces emotional awareness alongside operational excellence. The shift from silence to dialogue, from suppression to resilience, is making the department stronger, better prepared and more human.

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.

We are really excited about the launch of a new project in NWA as part of the Social Innovation Initiative.

The project, “Innovative Solutions for Refugee Integration and Crisis Mitigation in EU Member States,” aims to address the humanitarian crisis caused by the war in Ukraine by facilitating the integration and social inclusion of refugees in EU Member States. The project runs from May 1, 2025 to April 30, 2026 and will achieve this through a multi-faceted approach that includes tailored vocational training, upskilling programs, and comprehensive support services for refugees.

In the project, NWA will focus on guidelines for integration of Ukrainians into European workplaces to support a wellbeing and prosperous future culture of integration.

The other participating organizations bring extensive expertise in social inclusion, a huge network of other European partners, and proven capacity in managing complex, multi-country projects. By leveraging social innovation and promoting collaboration among EU member states, the project seeks to build more resilient and inclusive societies.

The project will empower refugees by providing them with the necessary skills and support to rebuild their lives, contribute to their host communities, and mitigate the consequences of the crisis on Member States’ societies and public services. Given NWA membership of the Network of European Social Entrepreneurs and Innovators, this is particularly interesting to also scale and transfer for other countries and settings.