We are here present, together with the Ministers of Health and their representatives from 53 countries in a Mediterranean working environment.
Major topics debated on this year agenda that might raise your interest: The new European Policy for Health – Health 2020; WHO Reform (including 12th General Program of Work 2014-2019 and Proposed Programme Budget 2014-2015), Strategy and Action Plan for Healthy ageing in Europe 2012 – 2020, European action Plan for strengthening public health capacity and services, among others.
Having an active role in this meeting, IFMSA has already delivered an oral statement about NCDs and we are going to present a video statement tomorrow since the heavy packed agenda didn’t allowed NGOs to deliver their statements on the WHO reform topic, as they generally can do.
One of the key statements of Dr Margaret Chan that engaged the audience was “Heath is too big to fail”, furthermore she insisted on the fact that “Health has a high profile in the region” and we should not forget that “Health is a precondition of development” even in the actual economic crisis. However, she didn’t deny the difficulties of the current times and wondered “how to place health in the complexity of society”, but she didn’t stop insisting in the “mutual accountability” for both DG and Member states.
We also met the Regional Director Zsuzsanna Jakob and we made the first contact towards the improvement between IFMSA Europe and WHO Regional Committee for Europe.
In the process, we were also able to meet some of the MMSA Malta members and had some discussions about the ideas for the future of our Region development. In this learning environment we started to collect some WHO publications in order to share them with the European NMOs
So far, it has been a great meeting and we hope that the last day, tomorrow, might bring more positive things to IFMSA.
From beautiful Malta,
Miguel Cabral
Oana Motea
Usman Musthaq
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