Creating a Pandemic of Health: global conference gathers experts at U of T

They’re calling it a health epidemic. And organizers of an upcoming global health equity and innovation summit at the University of Toronto say they hope it will be contagious.

In a bid to shift the emphasis in health care away from disease and towards health, the Dalla Lana School of Public Health is convening Creating a Pandemic of Health from November 3 to 5, 2014. The summit will focus on global health, equity and innovation.

The idea of starting a pandemic of health is provocative, said Rani Kotha, senior strategist in global health and innovation at U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

“At the core of this idea is the belief that health is about more than the absence of disease,” Kotha said. “It’s thinking about health from a holistic perspective. Public health should really be about being able to self-manage, adapt and thrive.”

Alejandro (Alex) Jadad, a professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Faculty of Medicine is a major proponent of social contagion. A Canada Research Chair in eHealth Innovation, and founder of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation at the University Health Network, Jadad said that any effort to create a health pandemic must be equitable.

“We need to look at how we can create and spread health in such a way that every person in every community in the world has the same opportunity to achieve a healthy life until the last breath,” Jadad said. “We can and must try to achieve this. To succeed, we’ll need innovative methods, indicators, policies and effective communication.”

“We want to create an enthusiastic, energetic, irresistible movement for positive change.”

Ross Upshur, head of the School’s clinical public health division and the Canada Research Chair in Clinical Global Health, believes the University of Toronto community can learn useful lessons about managing health from its partners nationally and worldwide.

“We have strong university connections with Ethiopia, China and Brazil, and it’s worth doing a cross-comparison between the four systems to see where the best integration of public health, disease prevention and clinical services occurs,” said Upshur.

The School is the ideal host for the summit because it is home to the Institute for Global Health Equity and Innovation, organizers said. The Institute, which is focused on breaking new ground in public health research and advocacy, expects the summit will generate new ideas and provide new direction.

Professor Abdallah Daar, chair of the School's undergraduate initiative in global and public health, says the summit is the starting point for a long-term program that will foster the spread of the health epidemic.

“We’ll come out of this with great ideas, innovations that people haven’t yet addressed seriously, global partners, curriculum materials and research questions,” he said. “The attendees will be inoculated with these ideas and take them to their own centres and universities, and we’ll build a global community of people who think alike.”