Global Consultations

The 14th World Congress on Public Health in Kolkata will attract hundreds of public health leaders and experts from around the world and across India – hence it presents an opportunity to discuss the most challenging public health problems we face. Participants can and will help elaborate the problems and discuss how to attack them.

We have worked with colleagues here in India to present an initial set of questions. Our goal is to attract participants to the global consoltations that will be part of the 2015 Congress.

Participants will interact directly with policy makers at the Global Consultation Sessions to be held on 11 February, 2015 at the Congress venue. Please consult the Programme for time and place.
The purpose of these consultations is to obtain congress participants’ views on the following issues:
 

Public Health Education – are reforms sufficient or do we need a revolution?

Key questions raised:

  1. What are the persisting gaps and failure to address the fresh and existing challenges of public health education cross cutting all levels of public health systems and all categories of public health workers?
  2. Are the existing curricula for professional public health education producing ill-equipped public health workers with inadequate competencies?
  3. What shoold be the new framework and strategic directions for transformative professional public health education & training for a more equitable and better performing health systems?

Sustainable Development and Environment – conflict or convergence?

Key questions raised:

  1. How critical is the threat of lack of Safe water and Environmental Sanitation to Public Health
  2. What are the challenges of environmentally provoked NCD’s / Vector-borne diseases
  3. How to address the Critical challenges in maintenance of minimum ecological flows (AbiralDhara) in our rivers
  4. What is the way forward for sustainable development vis-a-vis ecological conservation!

Health Sector Reform: Time to introspect?

Key questions raised:

  1. Has scaling up program of health sector reform been balanced and matching?
  2. Are Inter and Intra-household inequalities addressed and attempted to reduce?
  3. Does Performance-Based Finance solve the problem of underutilization of services in the gamut?

Are we putting children in the centre of public health debate?

Key questions raised:

  1. Do the Policies and programmes taken up by various Government Departments in India for children take into account the social determinants influencing the outcomes expected from these programmes?
  2. Are there effective mechanisms and defined protocols to ensure that the programmes meant for improving children’s health complement each other in reaching the goals defined in the programmes?
  3. How does the ‘one size fits all’ kind of programmes fit in with diverse social, cultural, economic realities of various regions?
  4. Are the funds allocated under these programmes commensurate with the needs identified?

Participants are encouraged to comment, voice their concerns or make suggestions which are to be compiled for preparing and publishing the consultation documents