GPHW2023: Young WFPHA: A Call to Action for the Future Leaders in Public Health

Theme: Preparing Public Health Professionals & Associations for the New Challenges

Date and Time: 03 April 2023 | 10:00 – 11:30 (CEST)

Event Description: The Young WFPHA (World Federation of Public Health Associations) is a network that unites early-career public health professionals and students. Its primary objective is to promote collaboration, networking, and leadership development among students and young professionals in the public health field. The mission of the network is to provide a platform for discussion, support, and advocacy, enabling early-career public health professionals across the globe to share knowledge, experiences and opportunities. The vision is to empower and engage the next generation of public health leaders to create a healthier and more equitable world. This will be achieved by promoting various opportunities for training, research, mentoring programs, networking, skill-building, and facilitating the exchange of knowledge and best practices across regions and disciplines.

Young WFPHA recognizes the importance of young people’s perspectives and voices in shaping public health policy at both the national and international levels. It seeks to represent and empower young people in decision-making processes and ensure that they have a say in the global public health discourse. In this regard, Young WFPHA has representation inside the WHO Youth Council (WHO YC), specifically attending to the Mental Health and NCDs Working group. The goal is to become an official member of the WHO YC within the next two years.

Following this presentation, representatives from several international associations in public health will be invited to participate in a roundtable discussion. This aims to encourage global collaboration and the dissemination of the network’s guiding principles. Young WFPHA’s aim is to bring together young people from different parts of the world, creating a global community that can collaborate, learn from each other, and take action to improve health outcomes for all. The network calls on all young professionals in public health to join in this mission.

Event Type: Panel Discussion & Round Table

Event Format: Virtual

Language(s): English

Organiser(s): WFPHA Students and Young Professionals Working Group

How to Attend In-person: N/A

How to Attend Virtually: Zoom

Registration: N/A

GPHW2023: Towards Training a New Generation of Infodemic Managers

Theme: Preparing Public Health Professionals & Associations for the New Challenges

Date and Time: 03 April 2023 | 13:00 – 14:00 (CEST)

Event Description: As new acute public health crises emerge daily, many countries request infodemic managers to be deployed. However, health-oriented agencies offering these services are in serious lack of people with experience and the right competencies. Early during the COVID-19 pandemic, people from disinformation research, journalism, and fact-checking stepped into this space to fill the analytical needs gap. What is now needed are fully trained infodemic managers who mastered the complex skillset required to mitigate the damaging impact of the infodemic on public health. This cannot be achieved without the cooperation of higher education institutions, mainly the Schools of Public Health and/or Faculties of Medicine. This online round table will bring international speakers of different backgrounds and affiliations to discuss the possible integration of infodemic management competencies into medical curricula and other forms of continuous medical education.

Speakers:

• Feili Tu-Keefner, School of Information Science, University of South Carolina, USA
• Santi Indira Astuti, Faculty of Communication Science, Islamic University of Bandung, Indonesia
• Mara Rubia Andre Alves de Lima, Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre, Brazil
• Stefan Mandić-Rajčević, Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade

Moderator:

• Aleksandar Stevanović, Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade

Event Type: Panel Discussion & Round Table

Event Format: Virtual

Language(s): English

Organiser(s): School of Public Health and Health Management, Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade

How to Attend In-person: N/A

How to Attend Virtually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0pl_z6wF4Q 

Registration: N/A

GPHW2023: Reducing Inequalities by Generating Innovative Health Tools and Services – French Red Cross

Theme: Empowering Our Communities – Protecting Minorities & the Most Vulnerable

Date and Time: 05 April 2023 | 11:00 – 12:00 (CEST)

Event Description: The webinar aims to describe the French Red Cross (FRC) vision and plan to fight against social inequalities in health, with a view to promoting access to prevention, healthcare, and social rights for vulnerable people. In addition to this objective, we work to (re)create social links with isolated and excluded people, and aim to strengthen their autonomy, their empowerment, and their resilience in terms of health. To achieve these objectives, many actors from the FRC network and partners, combine their efforts and skills through four forms of projects:

• A volunteer network involved in social and health centers,
• Mobile teams, driving the outreach approach,
• Medicalized social housing for homeless people,
• Health access points.

Each project can thus offer one or more free services, including medical and paramedical care; delivery of medication for people without health coverage; prevention, health promotion and therapeutic education activities; psychosocial support activities; individualized social support; and coordination of complex pathways. In support of fieldwork, the FRC is working to create tools to improve knowledge of vulnerable populations and their needs, to map and identify good practices, to better communicate with patients, and to facilitate their care pathways.

Event Type: Seminar/Webinar

Event Format: Virtual

Language(s): English

Organiser(s): Croix-Rouge française

How to Attend In-person: N/A

How to Attend Virtually: N/A

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.fr/e/billets-reducing-inequalities-by-generating-innovative-health-tools-and-services-545991363867

GPHW2023: Addressing Health Care Workers’ Psychological Distress and Moral Injury as a Public Health Priority

Theme: 3 Themes

Date and Time: 03 – 05 April 2023 | 18:00 – 19:00 (CEST)

Event Description: Public health stakeholders in South Africa, including the South African government, academics and subject experts, people living with HIV (PLHIV), people with lived experience of mental health conditions, and representatives from international agencies met in September 2022 and identified a need to build awareness of moral injury as a concept among HCWs and management, as part of a strategy to tackle the psychological distress facing many HCWs in the workplace. The whole area of mental health is a new challenge that needs to be faced by Public Health Professionals and Associations, not only in South Africa, but globally as well. This webinar will seek to unpack the concept of moral injury, including how inadequate resources, policies that conflict with morals and values, cultural differences, and corruption in the health system drive the experience of moral injury in HCWs in South Africa. It will build on the report of the September 2022 round table meeting, in which panellists suggested that mental health champions, peer support structures (e.g., WhatsApp groups), campaigns, and employee assistance programs (EAPs) are potential mechanisms to build mental health resilience in HCWs. The target audience would be HCWs, management, professional associations, industry professionals and government officials. Three weeks after this Global Public Health Week, on 24-25 April, we will be hosting a major two-day in person Mental Health Conference in Johannesburg. This webinar would serve as an important opportunity to focus on an important area of mental health in the public sector in the lead-up to the conference.

Event Type: Seminar/Webinar

Event Format: Virtual

Language(s): English

Organiser(s): Foundation for Professional Development 

How to Attend In-person: N/A

How to Attend Virtually: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0Wb3p3fMQ2u738fgWSKoGg 

Registration: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0Wb3p3fMQ2u738fgWSKoGg 

GPHW2023: Climate Change: A Public Health Crisis with a Health-centred Solution

Theme: Tackling the Climate Crisis

Date and Time: 04 April 2023 | 14:00 – 14:45 (CEST)

Event Description: Climate change threatens to undermine the last 50 years of gains in public health. We are experiencing intensifying heatwaves and extreme weather events, worsening flood and drought, the spread of infectious diseases, and exacerbated poverty and mental ill-health, all connected to the climate crisis. However, an aligned, global and equitable response to climate change will bring immense benefits for human health, with cleaner air, healthier diets, and more liveable cities. The Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change exists to monitor this transition from threat to opportunity. We are a collaboration of over 300 leading experts from academic institutions and UN agencies across the globe, bringing together climate scientists, engineers, energy specialists, economists, political scientists, public health professionals and doctors. Each year our findings are published annually in medical journal The Lancet ahead of the UN climate change negotiations. Our data makes clear how climate change is affecting our health, the consequences of delayed action and the health benefits of a robust response. During GPHW 2023, join this webinar with Lancet Countdown experts to explore:

• The latest evidence on the links between climate change and public health, using data from the 2022 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: health at the mercy of fossil fuels.
• The role of Public Health associations in helping avoid the worst health impacts of climate change, and achieving a healthy, thriving future – including how global public health actors can use Lancet Countdown indicators and data.

Event Type: Seminar/Webinar

Event Format: Virtual

Language(s): English

Organiser(s): The Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change

How to Attend In-person: N/A

How to Attend Virtually: Zoom

Registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_UIBvVtvKS02Ng5MVrjIdtg 

GPHW2023: Opening Ceremony

Global public health leaders, including Dr Jarbas Barbosa da Silva Jr., Director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), will officially open the second edition of Global Public Health Week (GPHW) on April 3, 2023, during a dedicated ceremony to be held at 12:00 (CEST). The ceremony will be followed by the event “Decolonizing Public Health”, organized by the WFPHA.

Join us to advance the importance of public health in everyone’s lives!