The main themes that will be tackled during the conference are:

• Governance to tackle the root causes of health inequities: implementing intersectoral action and Health in All Policies.
• Health systems as a social determinant: the role of the health sector, including services and public health programmes, in improving health inequities.
• Monitoring progress: measurement and analysis of health inequities and policies to address social determinants.
• Promoting participation: community leadership for action on social determinants.
• Action on social determinants to achieve global priorities and the role of global partners.

“..There is increasing recognition that the implementation of a ‘Health in All Policies’ (HiAP) approach requires new skills and competencies, both within the health sector and across other sectors. In 2010, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Government of South Australia co-organised an international meeting on HiAP, where new skills and competencies in public health were discussed and documented in the Adelaide Statement on HiAP.

As reflected in the Adelaide Statement on HiAP, action on the social determinants of health is complex and requires a joined-up cross sector approach. It recognises that a healthy population is a key requirement for achieving society’s goals and that addressing the growing inequity gap within low and middle-income countries will improve well-being for everyone.

This course is being convened as a follow-up to the Adelaide meeting by the Government of South Australia with technical support from WHO. It will bring together practitioners and academics from several highly esteemed international and regional universities. Professor Ilona Kickbusch is the summer school’s Course Director and is joined by Course Co-Director Ms Carmel Williams, Manager HiAP SA Health.

The course will build on the Adelaide Statement and, in particular, it aims to:

• explore the concepts and approaches to taking . action on the social determinants of health and health equity, including intersectoral action, HiAP, joined-up policy-making and shared health governance
• identify and define frameworks and tools that . underpin HiAP approaches, including policy innovation, novel mechanisms and partnerships, sustainable development, new instruments and better regulatory frameworks
• examine national and regional approaches to . shared health governance and HiAP in a range of issues; e.g. non-communicable diseases, health equity
• review and share efforts of HiAP practice from . participants’ own experiences.

Faculty members
Prof Fran Baum (Flinders University, South Australia)
Ms Christine Fang Meng-sang (Council of Social Service, Hong Kong)
Mr Robert Quigley (New Zealand)
Applications
As there are a limited number of positions available for this course, please send a short covering letter,
résumé and completed application form to hiap@health.sa.gov.au

Applications will be open until 31 July 2011. Successful applicants will be notified by email by 9 September 2011.
For further information on the application process, please contact Carmel Williams.

Application forms are available from:
Carmel Williams, Course Co-Director Manager,
Health in All Policies Unit
PO Box 6 Rundle Mall Adelaide South Australia Australia 5000
Tel +61 8 8226 7957Fax +61 8 8226 7102

For more information on HiAP and related work, please visit the following sites:
www.sahealth.sa.gov.au/healthinallpolicies
www.ilonakickbusch.com
http://www.wpro.who.int/
www.who.int/social_determinants/en

• Antimicrobial resistance: no action today no cure tomorrow
  We live in an era of medical breakthroughs with new wonder drugs available to treat conditions that a few decades ago, or even a few years ago in the case of HIV/AIDS, would have proved fatal. For World Health Day 2011, WHO will launch a worldwide campaign to safeguard these medicines for future generations. Antimicrobial resistance and its global spread threaten the continued effectiveness of many medicines used today to treat the sick, while at the same time it risks jeopardizing important advances being made against major infectious killers.
• World Health Day – 7 April 2011

The World Health Organization has selected antimicrobial resistance as the theme for World Health Day 2011, given the significant worldwide increase in this phenomenon in recent years, whose consequences include higher morbidity and mortality and a higher cost of treating infectious diseases.

Main theme: Antimicrobial resistance:

- basic or clinical microbiology

- infections associated with health care

- impact of resistance on the burden of disease

- impact on public health

- clinical outcomes

- financial costs.

Papers will be accepted in Spanish or English

On 25 and 26 November 2010, government officials from across the
European Region were brought together in Oslo, Norway at the UNDESA/WHO
Regional High-level Consultation in the European Region on the
Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases to discuss and
provide input to the preparations for the 2011 High Level Meeting
convened by the United Nations General Assembly.

We are now seeking comments from all stakeholders in Europe on the
proceedings of the Consultation in the European Region on the Prevention
and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases.

The comments received will be used to influence the European
contribution to the First Global Ministerial Conference on Healthy
Lifestyles and Noncommunicable Disease Control to be held in Moscow
28-29 April 2011 and to the pre-meeting of European delegations to be
held on 27th April 2011 also in Moscow.

The report is available to download from a password protected web site
for your review and comments.
Please use the following three steps:

1.      Click on the following link. <http://bit.ly/fxaSZe>  or <https://euro.sharefile.com/f/foe69261-01c1-4a78-a40c-f9736d97e8ea>

2.      When you first enter the site, you will be prompted for an
e-mail and password.  They are:
e-mail: ncdconsultation@euro.who.int
password: oslo2010    (case sensitive)

3.      This will give you access to the folder with the report, which
you can download and save to your computer in either English and Russian
and in both PDF and Word formats. Comment either in the Word document
(using track changes) or by e-mail.

Please e-mail the updated document and/or comments directly to
ncdconsultation@euro.who.int  by 28 February 2011.

Thank you very much in advance for your contributions.

Dr Gauden GALEA, Director, Noncommunicable Diseases and Health Promotion
WHO Regional Office for Europe, Copenhagen, Denmark

Equity is an important issue to champion for, and is far for been overcome by governments, international or global institution, or academia. However nobody disagrees with it because is too broad. We would like to provide more detail, be more specific and, at the same time, offer a multi disciplinary look. Following this, we intend to  qualify equity, defining a series of key topics:

• Inequity in access to essential drugs
• Inequity in access to high cost treatments
• Inequity in access to primary health care
• Inequity in the process of health care provision
• Sexual and reproductive health and equity
• Financially catastrophic out of pocket expenditures in health
• Community Participants and health equity
• Quality assurance and its impact to equity
• Communication campaigns, advocacy and health
• Equity to care in different health systems and the impact on equity of Health reforms (decentralization, primary health care strategies, georeference).
• Impact evaluation of health programs and health promotion interventions
• Environment, water, sanitation and inequity in health status and treatment

Equity is not only a research issue. It requires an interdisciplinary approach and a research & policy partnership showing clear experiences about how to reach equity in health. Therefore, we identify certain arenas where research and policymaking interact:

i- Political economy of health reforms
ii- Program evaluation
iii- Governance

Thank you.

June 6-10, 2011
Geneva, Switzerland

Global Health Programme – Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
Course Director: Professor Dr Ilona Kickbusch

……Diplomacy is undergoing profound changes in the 21st century  and global health is one of the areas where this is most apparent. The negotiation processes that shape and manage the global policy environment for health are increasingly conducted not only between public health experts representing health ministries of nation states but include many other major players at the national level and in the global arena.

These include philanthropists and public-private players. As health moves beyond the purely technical to become an ever more critical element in foreign policy, security policy and trade agreements, new skills are needed to negotiate global regimes, international agreements and treaties, and to maintain relations with a wide range of actors.

The summer course will focus on health diplomacy as it relates to health issues that transcend national boundaries and are global in nature, discuss the challenges efore it, and how they are being addressed by different groups and at different levels of governance.

Course Highlights

Deliberations on Intellectual Property Rights, The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the International Health Regulations, the creation of new finance mechanisms such as the Global Fund for Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria or UNITAID, as well as the response to SARS and Avian Flu are cases in point and will provide the real-life backdrop to the discussions.
The programme will also discuss approaches to policy coherence at the national level, such as national global health strategies  and at the level of regional organisations….

Course topics include:

• Introduction to global health, global health diplomacy and global health governance
• Health and foreign policy
• Coordination at the national and regional level for global health
• The actors, stakeholders and interest in global health governance and diplomacy
• The dynamics of global health negotiations
• Key methods, processes, instruments and mechanisms in global health diplomacy
• Cross cutting issues: Understanding the widening content of diplomacy and the key interface with health

*      *     *
This message from the Pan American Health Organization, PAHO/WHO, is part of an effort to disseminate
information Related to: Equity; Health inequality; Socioeconomic inequality in health; Socioeconomic
health differentials; Gender; Violence; Poverty; Health Economics; Health Legislation; Ethnicity; Ethics;
Information Technology – Virtual libraries; Research & Science issues.  [DD/ KMC Area]
Washington DC USA

Materials provided in this electronic list are provided “as is”. Unless expressly stated otherwise, the findings
and interpretations included in the Materials are those of the authors and not necessarily of The Pan American
Health Organization PAHO/WHO or its country members.
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PAHO/WHO Website
Equity List – Archives – Join/remove: http://listserv.paho.org/Archives/equidad.html
Twitter http://twitter.com/eqpaho

G8 summit on June 25-26 in Canada’s Muskoka region

“………G8 watchers have been speculating about the blackflies in Muskoka for months, but it is mosquitoes that will feature in formal discussions at the upcoming Summit. As host of the G8, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has announced that he will ask his colleagues to focus on the extent to which countries have met previous G8 commitments (Office of the Prime Minister 2010). Among them was a pledge in 1998 to support the global “Roll Back Malaria” initiative, with the goal of significantly reducing the death rate from the disease by 2010.

G8 watchers have been speculating about the blackflies in Muskoka for months, but it is mosquitoes that will feature in formal discussions at the upcoming Summit. As host of the G8, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has announced that he will ask his colleagues to focus on the extent to which countries have met previous G8 commitments (Office of the Prime Minister 2010). Among them was a pledge in 1998 to support the global “Roll Back Malaria” initiative, with the goal of significantly reducing the death rate from the disease by 2010.

Canada will also be championing a global agenda for improving maternal and child health at the Summit. With only five years left until the 2015 deadline, much progress still needs to be made to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (Secretary General to the United Nations 2010). One of those goals is to reduce the under-five mortality rate by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015. The United Nations reports that child mortality in developing countries fell from 99 deaths per 1,000 live births at the beginning of this period to 72 in 2008. With a goal of 33 deaths per 1,000 live births by 2015, there is still much to do.

Can it be done? Historical analysis by Hans Rosling (2009) from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute demonstrates that significant progress is possible…..

What were the trends in public health indicators over the last four years? What factors influence health, and what are the challenges for the future? What contribution can health systems make to improve population health in the WHO European Region? In addressing these questions, this report illustrates the wide-ranging reforms countries have undertaken to strengthen performance in four core functions of health systems: service delivery, resource generation, financing and stewardship.

This report presents essential public health information to support countries in choosing sound investments in health. It should encourage the successful implementation of effective health system reforms and policies, and help countries improve their health systems’ performance to provide efficient, patient-centred, high-quality health care. The annex provides some of the data used in the analysis.

For more information about the book, how to order and a link to the electronic version check:
http://www.euro.who.int/InformationSources/Publications/Catalogue/20091218_1

At the International Swine Flu Conference, attendees will be able to draw on first-hand best practices to create the solid business continuity plans that their companies and organizations need in order to prepare for, respond to, and survive a pandemic.

The International Swine Flu Conference draws on the success of the seven previous Bird Flu summits which featured as speakers several distinguished personalities such as Dr. David Nabarro, the United Nations Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza, Alex Thiermann of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) and Dr. Wenqing Zhang of the WHO Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response.

Well-known emergency responders, heads of hospitals from around the world, and hog/swine industry leaders will speak in this summit.

For more information on the event, please visit http://new-fields.com/isfc_uk/