The assembly itself!

We have provided you with constant feedback on what work IFMSA has been doing at the World Health Assembly. And maybe not so much about what has been going on in the assembly itself. Following is a short presentation on what the assembly itself has been discussing and worlds health leaders has agreed on towards achivieving health for all.

At the Health Assembly two main types of meeting are held, each with a different purpose:

• Committees meet to debate technical and health matters (Committee A), and financial and management issues (Committee B), and approve the texts of resolutions, which are then submitted to the plenary meeting.
• Plenary is the meeting of all delegates to the World Health Assembly. The Health Assembly meets in plenary several times in order to listen to reports and adopt the resolutions transmitted by the committees. The Director-General and Member States also address the delegates at the plenary.

In addition, technical briefings are organized separately on specific public health topics to present new developments in the area, provide a forum for debate and to allow for information sharing.

The assembly opened with remarks pointing to tremendous achievements in recent years, and the need to remain vigilant and committed to reaching our targets for healthier communities worldwide. The following day The Prime Minister of Bangladesh and Bill Gates, Wearing a lapel-pin stamped “END POLIO NOW,” he renewed his commitment to fighting disease. After the speeches  Japanese and WHO experts briefed Member States on radiation and public health issues, at both the national and international level, following the accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.

The Director-General opened debates on WHO reform, the largest in it’s 63 year history, by affirming change is imperative for “the outdated management structures and approaches that threaten to hold us back, and make WHO less influential than it deserves to be. Member States responded enthusiastically to the reform proposal and urged Dr Chan to take strong leadership to turn the plan into reality.

During the following days the discussions on future of financing for WHO continued.

On wednesday the main topic was NCDs (Non-communicable diseases) The technical briefings  conference room overflowed as delegates and NGOs discussed this serious matter that contribute to more than 60 percent of deaths worldwide. The day after Committee A agreed on a framework for pandemic influenza preparedness, the culmination of four years of negotiation. The framework will, for example, improve influenza virus sharing and access to vaccines. Member States agreed the framework lays the groundwork for better preparedness and better access to tools and knowledge. The next phase is to ensure the implementation of the agreement. The tecnichal briefing was on promoting women’s and children’s health. The UN Commission for Information and Accountability presented there report. The briefing was attended by hundreds.

Friday was a very eventful day were many important topics was discussed such as Global Immunization Vision and Strategy, Maternal, infant and young child nutrition, Global Code of Practice on International Recruitment of Health Personnel, Strengthening health systems. 

As the IFMSA delegation attended a workshop orginazed by Global Fund on saturday, the member states unanimously approved a resolution on the preparations for the United Nations General Assembly high-level meeting on the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases being held this September. The Assembly also discussed the report on improving access to quality and affordable medical products from the working group on substandard/spurious/falsely-labelled/falsified/counterfeit medical products.

This was just a small overwiev of the main activities at the assembly, the IFMSA team was almost always present at the pleanry sessions and the technichal briefings. We made several interventions that higlighted our position in some of the issues.

There is still some days left and we will try to keep you involved!

All the best

Usman A. Mushtaq and IFMSAs WHA team

Exciting days for SCORA at the WHA!

On Thursday, one of the important meetings of the day was at the UNAIDS office with Dr Joy Backory, senior partnership advisor for UNAIDS and Dr Kate Thomson, Chief of Civil Society Partnership Team of UNAIDS.

UNAIDS is a very important partner for IFMSA and the Committee on Reproductive Health including AIDS (SCORA). It is a joint programme created by ten co-sponsoring organization (UNFPA, UNDP, WHO, UNICEF, World Bank etc.) working on achieving their vision of a worldfree of HIV/AIDS.

We presented IFMSA activities and suggested exploring new ways of collaboration, which would be identified in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) we are aiming to sign between our IFMSA and UNAIDS.

MoU is an important document that all our NMOs can use when asking for support to their projects and activities in means of receiving materials, publications, condoms for World AIDS Day, using UNAIDS Regional Offices when organizing different trainings, inviting UNAIDS external speakers to the Regional Meetings and many many more!

The possibility of UNAIDS opening internship places for IFMSA members was also raised. UNAIDS Internships are an amazing opportunity to get involved into youth HIV/AIDS and reproductive health issues. Places would be open for the applicants not only in UNAIDS Headquarters in Geneva, but also in the Regional Offices. It is definitely something we would be following upon, as we believe that many SCORAddicts and IFMSA members would be interested in it!

As we are in the 10th week before the August Meeting in Denmark, we invited UNAIDS externals to attend our GA and to provide us with the special SCORA package containing materials and resources about HIV/AIDS and sexual and reproductive health.

In the afternoon, after having to choose among too many exciting side events, part of the IFMSA delegation attended “Youth and Health Risks” side event. It was organized in collaboration with UNFPA Regional Offices in Tunisia and it included a videoconference with three young people from Tunisia who talked about health risks young people, especially adolescents, face during that period.

Side event, of course, ended with everyone knowing who is IFMSA and what do we stand for as we made an intervention stating that young people are important part of the solution in initiating healthier actions and catalysing healthy lifestyles among youngsters.

There were present representatives from the WHO Department on Maternal, Neontal, Child and Adolescent Heath, as well as UNAIDS and UNFPA representatives.

On friday, we had a meeting with the Partnership for Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health (PMNCH) of the WHO. With the PMNCH we are collaborating on the Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health. To make it clearer, IFMSA has set up a SWG of 8 members who will work on creating IFMSA’s commitments to the Global Strategy. The PMNCH recognizes us as the ones who can contribute in achieving the common MDG 5 goal by 2015 and for that reason we decided to start creating a short set of measurable and reachable interventions and entry points that will guide SCORA’s work on maternal health towards achieving the Global Strategy.

We also asked for the materials for AM (for SCOPHians as well and we gave them an invitation for our GA in Denmark which they accepted finishing the 1 hour meeting with the words: use us!

These meetings and side events are only part of the entire program that I have been attending this week, defending the colours of our beloved SCORA and making sure that people know SCORA and IFMSA.

I am honoured and proud to be part of this amazing IFMSA delegation!

Josko

Day 5, whats going on here?…..

The past days has again been extremely eventful. The delegation has great knowledge on the technical discussion that is taking place during the plenaries and side events, that has allowed us to take an active part of the discussions. This is being noticed by the delegates of the assembly, and by that we mean the world health community including minsters, head of directorates and the civil society.

The team with Unni, CJ and Leo in the lead drafted several statements that we intended to read up during the plenaries, unfortunately the agenda has changed so many times that we have managed to only make one statement on Health system strenghtning (Its sent out on the servers). After reading the statement, the team was approached by several delegates who wanted to congratulate the IFMSA for taking a stance on this important issue.

A summary of some of the achievements:

There has been a lot of talk about Non Communicable deases during the assembly, the focus has especially fallen on the upcoming UN high-level summit in New York this September. WHO has had regional meetings in all of the regions to prepare the member states  towards the summit. On Wednesday it was a briefieng on what countries had been discussing in the different regions. The team had already prepared an intervention on the same topic and decided to read a statement during the briefing infront of many health leaders. We got a good and long response from the Assistant Director General who appreciated the contribution and the role of the youth.

Maybe a more neglected issue during the assembly is the environmental impact on human health. This is something the Dept. of Public Health and Environment and the government of Mexico trying to something about. In joint efforts, they arranged an important side event by inviting several health leaders to discuss initial strategy towards big conferences like the Rio+20 earth summit and COP 17 in Durban. As you probably know, IFMSA has done some big big things on climate and health. We have attended COPs, actively participated with the youth NGOs and had a LOT of activity within IFMSA. Because of that we have had a very good relation with WHO and we got invited to this side event to make a statement on behalf of students. They actually allocated time for us to speak and have our say. We urged health ministries to have intersectorial approach to this issue and get more involved in the national and international negotiations.

Apart from many such interventions, the third most notable intervention we did was on a briefing about Youth and Health risks. Which the IFMSA also Will read a statement during the plenary when this is issue is raised. More on that later.

Beside attending the plenaries and the side events, the IFMSA officials have had a VERY busy schedule of external meetings. The World Health Assembly I a uniqe place where many of the externals our federasjon is working and collaborating with. You`ll be able to read about that on the report later on.

That’s it for now peeps, tune for more exciting news very soon J

Best regards

Usman A. Mushtaq and The IFMSAs WHA team