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Within a week, from October 26 to 31, the Open Society Foundation’s Health Media Initiative brought together a diverse group of Roma and non-Roma health workers, medical doctors, students and NGO activists to discuss and generate ideas on Changing the Narrative on Roma in the Context of Healthcare.

The seminar was held in Schloss Arenberg in Salzburg, Austria. It stepped upon recent research undertaken on the attitudes of healthcare professionals towards Roma, as well as on the health rights of Roma in central Europe. The seminar also drew upon expertise in the emerging field of Narrative Medicine, which looks at the way in which narratives shape patients’ experience of ill health and of the health care system, and can either encourage or stand in the way of empathy and understanding between clinician and patient. Through participatory exercises participants have looked at ways in which language used and stories told by health care workers shape and influence the way that Roma people are treated within and experience the health care system.

During the training the participants came to the conclusion that the change should start from us: we need to change first our own narratives, within the community. Nevertheless, this should go hand in hand with changing the narratives on Roma both by specialists working in the healthcare system, as well as by the majority population. Story telling is one of key instruments, especially if it is done by role models: it is a key instruments of change both for the Roma community and for the majority society. The participants were trained how to do it in an interactive and innovative way using theater-based techniques and various channels of communication introduced by Paul Browde, MD, and Murray Nossel, PhD (a psychiatrist and an Oscar nominated documentary filmmaker, teaching in the Narrative Medicine Masters Program at Columbia University, and founders of Narrative, Inc, a storytelling company), Judith W. Overall (former faculty member and Chair of the Department of Health Systems Management, Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, New Orleans), Jyotika Ramaprasad, PhD. (Professor, Vice Dean for Graduate Studies and Research, Interim Director for the Center for Communication, Culture, & Change at the University of Miami) and Brett Davidson (Project Director, Health Media Initiative, PHP, OSF, New York).

At the training Bulgaria was presented by Teodora Krumova (Center Amalipe), Radosveta Stamenkova, MD (Bulgarian Family Planning and Sexual Health Association) and Julia Yaneva (grantee of the Roma Health Scholarship Program). They presented the positive example of the Roma Health Scholarship Program and the Health mediators in Bulgaria for changing the narrative on Roma, especially within the Healthcare system. In addition, Teodora Krumova presented the community monitoring method as a systematic approach for changing the narrative on Roma in the context of healthcare having the community as the major agent of change within and outside the system.