Public Health Leaders Convene in NY to Plan Global Conference

The global public health issues of the 21st Century represent a significant change in scale and breadth from earlier conceptions of “international health”. Given the unprecedented growth in the field in recent decades, leadership in this arena has become critical and it requires a particular understanding of the unique contributions of public health within the broader context of global health.

To address these very issues, Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health recently hosted leaders from academia and industry for a planning meeting to develop a framework for the upcoming global conference, The Changing Landscape of Global Public Health, to take place in October 2010.

Forty-six participants, including key public health leaders from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, gathered at the Columbia University campus in New York during the first week in March for the preliminary planning meeting.

Dr. Richard Parker, professor of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School, chaired the conference planning committee where participants fleshed out issues for the October conference to address and developed a joint vision to frame the talks and shape the conference’s goals and accomplishments.

Organized by the Mailman School with a number of institutional partners, The Changing Landscape of Public Health Conference will bring together thought-leaders from around the world with five ambitious goals:

To broaden and deepen understanding of the intersections that constitute the field of global public health in the early twenty-first century and for the future;
To explore the key conceptual and practical challenges – with an eye on population needs – that currently confront this field;
To develop innovative strategies to most effectively address those challenges;
To disseminate the discussions and resolutions reached by public health leaders at the conference to a range of audiences around the globe; and
To articulate a vision of the most effective ways in which the field needs to lead going forward.

By convening key stakeholders including global public health researchers, practitioners, advocates and policymakers, the invitation-only conference aims to ensure that participants include a significant number of leaders from both the global South and North, broadly representing different regions of the world.

The support of a number of co-sponsors has been instrumental in planning the conference including the Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH) and the Imperial College, London.