Global Health Leaders Meet in Rome to Discuss Framing the Future of Public Health

October 22, 2017

IANPHI member National Public Health Institutes (NPHI) from all over the world met in Rome, Italy to exchange concepts and perspectives on ways to improve global health.

The discussion took place during the 2017 IANPHI Annual Meeting with more than 100 IANPHI members, partners and representatives from the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance Network (CHAMPS), the Africa Centers for Disease Control, European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and many more global health leaders from around the world. The Istituto Superiore di Sanita (ISS), the Italian national institute of health, hosted the four-day meeting.

Developing future public health leaders

The meeting commenced with a session of the IANPHI Leadership Academy. Facilitated by Sue Binder, senior advisor for public health practice, the mission of this leadership training is to foster excellence and best practices in leadership through experiential learning. 19 IANPHI-African NPHI directors or technical leads participated.

Shaping the future of public health through NPHIs

Preventing, detecting, and responding to diseases and other public health threats are more important now more than ever before, and National Public Health Institutes, or NPHIs, play a critical role in each of these tasks. The meeting was a great opportunity for NPHIs to share experiences, to learn, and to teach each other the best practices possible to express this responsibility.

IANPHI's second decade

Last year, IANPHI celebrated 10 years of connecting, creating and transforming NPHIs and is moving into its next decade with the experience and momentum needed to help more countries address - sustainably and over the long term - the evolving public health challenges of today and the future. “We cannot predict when the next pandemic will emerge or where”, said IANPHI President Mauricio Hernández-Ávila. “But we are certain that the scientists and the public health workforce of our Institutes will be on the front line of defense.”

The General Assembly named Ebba Abate, director of the Ethiopian Public Health Institute in Ethiopia, Tsogtbaatar Byambaa, director of the National Center for Public Health in Mongolia, and Lothar Wieler, director of the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, as its newest Executive Board members and Andre N. van der Zande, director of the Netherland's National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, as vice president and welcomed the National Institute of Public Health of Tunisia as a full member and Punjab Public Health Agency as an associate member.

The 2018 IANPHI Annual Meeting will take place in London, home to next year’s host and EB member Duncan Selbie the director of Public Health England.