A strong public health infrastructure provides the capacity to prepare for and respond to emerging and long standing public health challenges. Such an infrastructure serves as the foundation for planning, delivering, and evaluating public health and requires a well-educated and well-trained professional public health workforce. Assuring a competent public health workforce is vital to managing the health of a population.

In light of recent emerging threats such as bio-terrorism, the development and expansion of public health training programs are now receiving renewed interest from governmental and non-governmental public health agencies. Yet, these programs themselves have a major and indispensable role in developing new insights and innovative solutions to public health training, including the introduction of new educational formats and modalities, contemporary technologies and managerial/organizational options. The process of globalization and accompanying scientific and technological changes requires the schools to design programs corresponding to global and Western standards of excellence, at the same time responding to more pressing country-specific, local needs, which is often logistically and methodologically burdensome process. Often the decisions are made and transformations are initiated by public health schools in limited resource environments. In this state of affairs, the expansion and support of amicable working network of public health programs both on regional and global level, which would allow sharing experiences and collaboratively finding best approaches to old and new public health education issues, appears to be a necessary (but not sufficient) prerequisite for successful development.

The 27^th ASPHER Annual conference will address the issues of development perspectives of Public Health schools in European and Mediterranean regions, revealing possible barriers and catalysts to the process of development. For the first time, the ASPHER conference will formally involve several schools of public health and health management from WHO's Eastern Mediterranean Region, increasing the diversity of opinions, approaches, and methodologies and to expand the network of cooperating schools and faculty throughout the region. We hope that the conference will lead to better understanding of future trends and challenges in public health training globally, and will leave schools of public health with sound solutions and working approaches to these emerging challenges.

Conference themes

1. Creating sustainable partnerships
2. Core public health competencies: Linking knowledge to real world practice
3. Evidenced based practice: Strengthening the link between health research capacity and policy development
4. Flexible learning: Cutting-edge learning techniques and technologies
5. Public Health training and global problems: Responding to migration, urbanization, poverty, and multi-cultural strife
   

TOPICS OF CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS:

Will be available soon.