On the invitation of the Slovak National Emergency Centre, Austrian and Hungarian representatives of the emergency services convened in Bratislava on 18 November. The aim of the meeting was to get to know each other before starting the preparation of a Slovak-Hungarian State Treaty on cross-border emergency services. The meeting was attended and co-organised by CESCI and CESCI Carpathia.

The participants were welcomed by Mr Jozef Karaš, medical director and Mr Osama Al-Khaldi, director of the National Emergency Centre of the Slovak Republic who gave a sketchy overview on the structure of the Slovak emergency services. Subsequently, Mr Alexander Vincent Šulík, an expert of the Regional Emergency Centre of Bratislava presented the system and operation of the Slovak services followed by reactions on behalf of Mr János Haness, regional director of the Western-Transdanubian Emergency Service of Hungary who compared the Slovak and the Hungarian systems in a nutshell.

The parties expressed their willingness to start negotiations on the development of cross-border provision of rescue services based on the Austrian-Czech model which was also applied during the design of the Austrian-Slovak and the Austrian-Hungarian State Treaties signed in the summer of 2024.

Siegfried Weinert, manager of cross-border cooperation of the Emergency Service of Lower Austria who has been playing a decisive role in the preparation of the three existing treaties encouraged the participants to avoid complicating the criteria for cooperation and to use the Austrian-Czech agreement as a model.

To prepare for the Slovak-Hungarian treaty, the participants agreed on the organisation of a professional/technical workshop to be held on 22 January in Banská Bystrica. The meeting will aim to exchange information about the national systems and to define the conditions for cross-border service provision. The meeting will be organised by CESCI Carpathia within the framework of the #ACCESS project.