WORLD HEALTH COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATES

WHO has chosen Human Resources for Health as the theme for next year's World Health Day and World Health Report. It will focus on the Health Workforce, and the crisis faced by many health systems with loss of health professionals to AIDS, and migration to other countries and other sectors. Workforce issues have been identified as the bottleneck to achieving the Millenium Development Goals and priority disease control initiatives. WHCA has been working with WHO, Geneva, on elaborating a Communications Strategy for World Health Day 2006.

Building upon the outcomes of the HIV/AIDS Ask? & Act! campaign development meeting in Turku in June, this meeting looked at ways to utilise Healthy City capacities to convene and lead the fight against HIV/AIDS at city level. The meeting brought together young people, PLWHA, health professionals and media to explore ways to “engage the unengaged” and add value to ongoing efforts, focusing specifically on the Russian Federation. See Articles for Scope & Purpose and Programme.

WHCA and the WHO Collaborating Centre for Healthy Cities and Urban Health in the Baltic Region in Turku, Finland, convened this meeting to review progress to date on the HIV/AIDS Ask? & Act! – It’s Your Health Campaign concepts elaborated at the Scoping Meeting held in Copenhagen on 12 December 2004. Six high-risk-HIV/AIDS cities affiliated with the WHO Healthy Cities Network – Izhevsk (Russian Federation), Jurmala (Latvia), Kaliningrad (Russian Federation), Kiev (Ukraine), St Petersburg (Russian Federation), and Tartu (Estonia) – had conducted media audits in their information marketplaces as a first step to launching city-based model campaigns. This meeting convened principal municipality-based organisers and relevant stakeholders to share the results of the audits and explore next steps. See Articles for Scope & Purpose, Programme, and Consultation Paper.

This meeting was convened to explore what role, if any, professional journals, as principal communication resources of many national medical, nursing and pharmacy associations, could play in a global/local campaign aimed at enhancing patient health competencies. To this end a range of national medical, nursing and pharmacist journal editors was gathered in Helsinki on the occasion of the WHO European Ministerial Conference on Mental Health. Journal strengths identified included perceived trustworthiness, editorial independence, and reliability as an evidence-based source. Weaknesses noted included proprietary nature of some journals, inaccessible technical language, intra-professional focus, healthcare rather than health focus, and the lack of input from patient users. Many opportunities for enhancing journal involvement were discussed including reframing ways of reporting on different illnesses (eg combating stigma related to mental health), creating platforms for patient voices, developing professional media advocacy capacities, networking, and opportunistic action. Please see Articles for copies of the Consultation Paper, Scope & Purpose, Programme and Report of the meeting.

Held at the offices of the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe, this workshop brought together participants from all the relevant stakeholders to review the current situation in Eastern European countries and explore opportunities for and obstacles to cooperative campaigning. As an outcome of the meeting, six cities from the Healthy Cities Network have agreed to take part in model HIV/AIDS Ask? & Act! projects. Please see Articles for copies of the Scope & Purpose, Programme, Consultation Paper and Report of the meeting.