April 3rd we were a big group of people from the CESAR network who set the course on EuroHeartCare 2014. This year the theme of the conference was ”Heart and Mind” and the conference was held in Stavanger, a beautiful city located on a peninsula on the southwest coast of Norway.

Some PhD-students attended the pre-conference and took part in the the Masterclass which was about ” How to build a successful international collaboration” lead by Professor Anna Strömberg (Linköping, Sweden) and Professor Debra Moser (Lexington,USA). It was a great opportunity for newer researchers to get together and learn more about collaboration, how to build successful networks and get to know other people who are in the beginning of their research career. We who attended had an interesting afternoon and look forward to a new masterclass next year!

The next day the sun was shining and inside the conference hall people started to prepare for the first interesting day of the conference. Many of the CESAR members had own presentations and posters during the conference. In the session about Ischaemic heart disease, Jan Mårtensson talked about ”The international statement on sexual counselling and its application in practice”. Jan had an interesting presentation about the importance of sexual health in cardiac patients’ and partner’s life and concluded that health care professionals need help to implement guidelines for sexual counseling in their daily practice. This presentation later got the award ”Best moderated poster”.

Another CESAR member who also was awared ”Best moderated poster” was Johan Israelsson discussing ”Post cardiac arrest care and follow-up in Sweden- a national survey”. Johan emphazised the importance of improving post cardiac arrest care with for exemple implementing national guidelines for such care.

In the evening of the first day, the Stavanger Convention Bureau invited all attendees of the conference to join a bus sightseeing tour of Stavanger. It was a pleasant trip through a beautiful landscape showing for exemple the reconstructed Iron age Farms and the Swords in Rock, which is a commemorate of Harald Hårfagre’s uniting of Norway into one kingdom in year 872. The tour ended with a walk through Old Stavanger with its white wooden cottages.

Day two of the conference showed up with rain and Kenneth Dickstein said during his talk something like ”today Stavanger has shown its true colours” meaning that it was more likely that one experienced rain rather than sun visiting Stavanger.

For one of the CESAR members this second day was a bit extra exciting. PhD student Leonie Verheijden Klompstra had been invited as speaker in the symposium Heart-Mind interventions: Turn negatives into postitives. Leonie talked about using game computers to increase physical activity in heart failure patients. In her own studies she evaluates the feasibility of using nintendo Wii as exergaming in heart failure patients. In her speech, Leonie talked about fun as a key factor in becoming and staying physical active and highlighted research which patients expressed as fun, like yoga, greek and walsh dancing.  Afterwards she got great and enthusiastic feedback.

Next years EuroHeartCare will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, we already look forward!

Text written by Leonie Verheijden Klompstra and Lisa Hjelmfors

All photos taken by Ghassan Mourad.