The Role of Urban Local Government in Influencing Multisectoral Action for Primary Health Care

Description

The International Institute of Primary Health Care, Ethiopia, in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, announce the first of the Tripartite Webinar series on Urban Primary Health Care: Challenges and Lessons. The objective of this webinar series is to enable an improved understanding of urban health challenges; identify opportunities for cross learning and sharing using a health systems lens, priorities for research, capacity building needs, and innovations; and build a community of practice for improved population level outcomes for urban primary health care.

This webinar looks to perspectives from Cuba, India, and South Africa where multisectoral convergent action has been undertaken through improving urban local governance. The session, moderated by David Vlahov, professor at the Yale School of Nursing and professor of epidemiology and microbial diseases at the Yale School of Public Health, brings together eminent speakers from these three countries, each of whom will share perspectives on urban governance mediated action for multisectoral convergence and improved primary health care.

Speakers:

David Vlahov is a professor at the Yale School of Nursing and professor of epidemiology and microbial diseases at the Yale School of Public Health. He is also the co-director of the National Program Office for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Culture of Health: Evidence for Action Program. Prior to this, Vlahov served as dean and professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing and earlier was senior vice president for research and director of the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies at the New York Academy of Medicine. His primary area of focus has been on urban health. Across these faculty appointments, he led the ALIVE study in Baltimore that recruited and followed 3,000 injection drug users to study the natural and then the treated history of HIV infection, providing key information for HIV prevention and treatment; and was recognized with a MERIT Award by the National Institutes of Health. His studies in Baltimore, Harlem, and the Bronx have served as a platform for subsequent individual-, community-level and policy-level intervention studies.

Krish Vallabhjee, chief director of strategy with the Western Cape Government, qualified as a medical doctor at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, Ireland (1981) and as a public health specialist in 1996 (FFCH) – Nelson Mandela School of Medicine (Natal University) Kwa-Zulu Natal. Other qualifications include a diploma in occupational health (Wits), senior executive program convened jointly by Harvard Business School/Wits University, and an executive MBA at the Graduate School of Business at University of Cape Town. Vallabhjee has 40 years of cumulative experience in the public health sector in South Africa including 11 years in clinical services in the public sector (Kwa-Zulu) and 25 years as a senior manager in the Health Department of the Western Cape.

Pedro Más Bermejo is a physician with dual specialties epidemiology and public health, as well as an emeritus research scientist at the Pedro Kourí Tropical Medicine Institute, emeritus member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences, full professor of epidemiology and public health at the National School of Public Health (Medical University of Havana), and adjunct professor School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University. He graduated from Central University in Cuba and trained in epidemiology in the National Institute of Hygiene, Epidemiology, and Microbiology in Cuba.