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Eighteen months in, EQUICARES continues to aim at improving mental health access for people in vulnerable situations with digital tools and resources. The tools include an interactive mental health pilot, Atlas, and, in development, an AI Assistant. These instruments are to help identify, analyse, monitor, and address barriers to mental health services.
Among the people in vulnerable situations targeted by the project are refugees, Roma communities, LGBTQI+ individuals, older migrants, and people with disabilities. Working across pilot sites in seven countries, EQUICARES has built an evidence base on barriers to access. Among its various methods, EQUICARES uses digital ethnography to identify otherwise uncovered, unreached groups. Using the Levesque Framework, the approach helps to understand and address supply- and demand-side challenges in mental health access.
What is EHTEL doing in EQUICARES?
At the time of writing, EHTEL is developing a Digital Health Literacy training module for a future self-paced EQUICARES MOOC consisting of ten modules.
EHTEL is also following closely every EQUICARES research development, pilot, smart health lab, and solution co-created to improve mental health access for people in vulnerable situations. Further down the line, EHTEL will lead the project’s replication strategy. This is why it’s helpful to examine EQUICARES’ latest as well as its lessons learned.
What is the latest from EQUICARES?
The latest developments by EQUICARES include:
- Reciprocal innovation: an EQUICARES consortium research group focused on reciprocal innovation. The work showcases how low- and middle-income countries, with scarce resources, can generate incredibly smart solutions.
- The Atlas: June 2026 marked a milestone for EQUICARES: a first version of the Atlas on Mental Health and Care Innovative Solutions was developed. This atlas provides an early input that will feed into a future policy dashboard.
- Smart Health Labs: established in Bulgaria, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Spain, and Turkey, these labs are running co-creation workshops for target audiences to have their say in identifying mental health care gaps and actionable priorities.
- A policy roundtable (a ‘townhall’): “Mental Health Without Barriers”, held in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, brought EQUICARES researchers together with local stakeholders and policymakers. Together, they presented and discussed early findings. It is noteworthy that a lot of local experts came from the educational field – such as from “mental health in all policies”. AMALIPE, the Bulgarian project partner which works with the Roma community, grasped this townhall opportunity and turned the meeting into a hands-on lesson in research-policy transfer.
What are EQUICARES lessons learned so far?
Two main outcomes can be highlighted:
- Reciprocal innovation: Learn from low- and middle-income countries abroad
EQUICARES’ innovative research approach shows that some of the strongest candidates for knowledge transfer have been built by lay workers, not specialists. The approaches have been used outside of Europe, in India, Pakistan, Thailand, or Zimbabwe which have created smart, feasible, affordable (digital) solutions to their challenges.
This is a hugely useful learning for many European nations, which also have their low- and middle-income regions, and are up against similar challenges: they too have not enough clinicians, not enough time, and not enough hands.
- The Veliko Tarnavo townhall meeting: Meet stakeholders face-to-face
Meeting local stakeholders and policymakers face-to-face in Veliko Tarnavo introduced EQUICARES researchers to their actual target group, and showed them how research and policy fields interact in practice. Visiting this 13th-century former capital of Bulgaria to talk with members of local communities graced the event with a prominence and legitimacy that no video-call could ever match. Holding the roundtable back-to-back with the consortium meeting built credibility, trust, and shared purpose for both the day-to-day research work and the communities it serves.
Source: EHTEL
This exercise was a first for the EQUICARES project, and will be worthwhile replicating elsewhere. It is perhaps EQUICARES’ most impressive lesson learned so far! Not only other EQUICARES’ pilots, but also other initiatives and projects – whether digitally-oriented or not – could benefit substantially from holding in-person and on-site meetings with local stakeholders.
Watch out later in 2026 for more news from EQUICARES and EHTEL, chiefly on the Digital Health Literacy MOOC training module and what can be learned from it.
Meanwhile, take a look at what EHTEL does in EQUICARES and EQUICARES own project website.
