On the 5th of May 2026, the SOSPHERE project hosted an online transnational workshop bringing together over 30 participants from seven countries: Austria, Croatia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Portugal, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom. Public authorities, healthcare practitioners, researchers, NGOs, and social workers joined to do something deceptively simple: share what works. The result was a rich, cross-border conversation about how communities in peripheral and underserved areas are reimagining access to health and social services, and what others can borrow from their experience.
The problem we started from
The SOSPHERE project exists because a postcode should not determine whether you can access a doctor, a social worker, or a mental health service. Yet across Central Europe, people living in remote, low-density, or demographically declining areas routinely face exactly that reality. Geographic isolation, ageing populations, transport gaps, fragmented institutions, and weak digital literacy all conspire to make services harder to find and harder to use. The workshop was designed to surface practical responses to these challenges: not abstract policy ideas, but concrete initiatives that have already been tested on the ground.
Building networks in Friuli Venezia Giulia
One of the first lessons came from the “Si fa Rete” (Building Networks) project in Italy’s Friuli Venezia Giulia region. Developed across two very different territories, the Giulian Karst area and the mountainous Carnia district, the initiative set out to strengthen community-based support for elderly and vulnerable citizens. Rather than designing new services from scratch, it focused on connecting what already existed: home care, social cooperatives, local associations, family caregivers, and municipal services. A Public Access Point acted as a single entry door into the system, while training for caregivers and volunteers helped build local capacity over time. The experience underscored a lesson that would echo throughout the workshop: trust takes time to build, and the relationships formed between institutions and communities are themselves a form of infrastructure.
Crossing borders for better health
From the Italian-Slovenian border area came an account of a decade-long evolution in cross-border healthcare cooperation. Starting with the Salute-Zdravstvo project and developing into the current Sanitas initiative, the EGTC GO and the Municipality of Ajdovščina have progressively moved from isolated project-based interventions toward something more durable: shared emergency protocols, joint medical teams, cross-border booking systems, and coordinated responses to crises. The path was not smooth, as differences in national healthcare structures, administrative procedures, and even language created persistent friction. But the direction of travel was clear: health cooperation works best when it is treated as a long-term governance commitment, not a one-off project.
A town in Somerset that changed how the NHS thinks about health
Perhaps the most internationally recognised story came from Frome, a small town in England, where a whole community approach to social prescribing delivered a striking outcome: between 2014 and 2017, unplanned hospital admissions fell by 14%, while rising across the wider region. The model connected GPs with social prescribing link workers, trained thousands of ordinary citizens as community “Connectors,” and systematically mapped local assets, from support groups to transport help, into a publicly accessible directory. The core insight was simple but powerful: many of the problems people bring to their doctor are not medical problems. Loneliness, financial insecurity, and social isolation respond better to community connection than to clinical intervention. Since 2019, link workers have been formally integrated into the NHS nationwide.
A one-stop shop in Pula, and an integrated care model from Portugal
The city of Pula, Croatia, offered a compelling example of what a well-designed one-stop-shop can achieve. The Support Centre 521 brought counselling, social support, legal assistance, healthcare information, and psychological help under one roof, physically accessible, adapted for people with disabilities, and backed by a digital platform mapping all available services across the urban area. Municipalities agreed to jointly finance its continuation after the project ended: a sign that the model had earned genuine institutional buy-in.
Closing the workshop, presentations from Portugal‘s IMPULSO project and the Local Health Unit of Northeastern Portugal illustrated how integrated governance and community-based digital health literacy can reinforce each other. Training local “micro-influencers” (i.e., community leaders, emergency services, religious figures) to spread validated health information proved more effective than top-down communication campaigns, and more sustainable too.
What SOSPHERE is taking forward
Across all these experiences, the same themes surfaced repeatedly: reduce fragmentation, build trust, meet people where they are, and make services easier to navigate.