The 11th International Conference on Urban Health, Manchester, United Kingdom, March 4-7th 2014
Conference Venue
The 11th International Conference on Urban Health, Manchester, United Kingdom, March 4-7th 2014
Conference Venue
On the 4th - 7th March 2014 the city of Manchester, United Kingdom will play host to the 11th International Conference on Urban Health (ICUH).
Manchester offers the perfect platform for such a high profile global conference offering both a rich public health history - Manchester was the birthplace of public health pioneer, Edwin Chadwick in 1800 - and a bright, exciting and vibrant future in terms of the innovation and opportunities for the city's residents, businesses, employers and visitors.
ICUH provides the ideal forum for knowledge exchange for urban health stakeholders attracting multidisciplinary scientists, practitioners, development partners and various national and regional senior policymakers from around the world. With the ultimate goal to mobilise and energise like-minded professionals, ICUH will address the effects of urbanisation and urban environments on the health of urban populations.
The conference will last for four days, with the first day (Tuesday 4th March) focusing on site visits to health, educational, historic and cultural places of interest in and around the city.
The following three days (Wednesday 5th - Friday 7th March) will consist of a wide range of plenary lectures by world renowned guest speakers. There will also be hosted workshops, delegate speakers and posters selected through abstract submission. Delegates have access to all these facilities throughout the conference.
ICUH was founded in 2002 and is sponsored by The International Society for Urban Health (ISUH). The first ever ICUH was held in Toronto, Canada and was held annually in various cities around the world for 9 years, since 2011, however the event has taken place every other year. ISUH's aim is to hold the conference in a different global city every other year in order to broaden the reach of the society and the impact of its efforts.
David Vlahov, the founder of the International Society of Urban Health and Sir Howard Bernstein, Chief Executive of Manchester City Council, express their views on ICUH 2014.
The International Society for Urban Health (ISUH) was founded in 2002 and is an association of researchers, scholars, professionals, community members, workers and activists from various disciplines, roles and areas of the world whose work is directly related to the health effects of urban populations. Membership is open to anyone who is interested in the health of urban populations.
ISUH is housed at the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM) ,an independent organisation that was set up to address the health challenges facing the world's urban populations. It does this through interdisciplinary approaches to policy leadership, education and community engagement. Every member gets a subscription to the society's Journal of Urban Health that it endorses as its official publication. There are also regular newsletters and literature reviews available to members as well as the society's website which is its primary hub for research and networks (www.isuh.org).
ISUH has a fundamental commitment to giving equal access to safe and healthy environments to all people and communities around the globe.
The University of Manchester is Britain's largest and most popular university with more students trying to gain entry than to any other university in the country, with a distinguished history of academic achievement and an ambitious agenda for the future. It was established in 1824 and it became one of six 'red brick' Universities in 1880. In its modern form, the University of Manchester is an amalgamation of the Victoria University of Manchester and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), formed in 2004.
It has a distinguished history of academic achievement and ambition and boasts the most working Nobel laureates in a British University, with four Nobel Prize winners in its current academic staff - including two professors who won the prize in 2010 for the discovery of Graphene - and twenty five winners of the Prize in the university's history. The university has embarked on an exciting and bold course called strategic vision 2020 which aims to put the university in the top 25 universities in the world. The university has an excellent track record in research, as demonstrated in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise in which it had a research power only exceeded by Oxford and Cambridge.
The university is split up in to four faculties and information about all of these can be found at UoM faculties and schools.
The Faculty of Medical and Human sciences is a leading international centre for research and education in medicine and a spectrum of health -related professions including nursing, midwifery, social work pharmacy, dentistry, psychology, audiology and speech and language therapy. In a recent major review intended on enhancing the research and teaching performance of the university, five Faculty schools were linked with six Faculty Institutes creating a matrix structure. The objective here is to ensure that the Faculty achieves a major academic profile in each priority area within the next five years.
The research effort will be focused on six priority areas:
FMHS - which has a total income of over £210 million, 6,500 undergraduate and 2,500 post graduate students - has strong relationships with outstanding NHS partners which are critical in trying to reach its goals.
The University, and particularly the Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences, is a key member of the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre (MAHSC). Formed in 2008, MAHSC is a Federation of Equal Partners enabled by a company limited by guarantee. The partners involved in MAHSC are: The University of Manchester, Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust, Salford Primary Care Trust (NHS Salford CCG), Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, The Christie NHS Foundation Trust and University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust.
MAHSC is one of only five Department of Health AHSCs in the UK. The designation is a mark of excellence across research, innovation, education and patient service and recognition of the potential to excel in translational medicine. Its vision is to be a leading global centre for the delivery of innovative applied health research and education in to healthcare. As with other AHSCs, MAHSC has a dual role: to act as a beacon of international excellence for UK plc and to provide leadership and early adoption for our local health system. This will be delivered via a tripartite approach encompassing: research and innovation, education and training and clinical service.
There are six centres within population health, they are: Biostatistics, Epidemiology, Health Economics, Health Informatics, Imaging Sciences and primary care. The centres are based on the University campus and the Wolfson Molecular Imaging Centre in Withington. The aim of the Institute is to enable The University of Manchester to reach its full potential as an internationally esteemed centre for research in population health and health sciences and to then translate that expertise in to improved health care and wellbeing for people not just locally but all around the globe.
Its areas of expertise include: 1) methodological research including advanced methodology in biostatistics; health economics; informatics and imaging 2) health policy and practice which is broadly focused on: analysing government policy as it affects health and health care; exploring the impact of changing policy; describing, explaining and evaluating variations in health care organisation and delivery; and developing and evaluating strategies to improve care, ranging from policy interventions to trials of complex interventions to improve patient outcomes; and 3) population health which investigates areas such as the factors determining disease risk, variation in treatment response, clinical progression and outcome. It also applies epidemiological approaches to the analysis of biological samples and clinical data generated through the university's bio-banking facilities (CIGMR) and the Northwest e-health e-lab (NIBHI). Similar methodologies are deployed to describe, explain and evaluate variations in care provision exploiting the unique data base resources generated by NDEC (drug misuse), TARN (trauma) and COEH (occupational health).
MAHSC (the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre) is a partnership between the University of Manchester and six NHS organisations. Our NHS partners are some of the most highly rated NHS Trusts in the country, and the University of Manchester is one of the top 3 UK research universities (RAE 2008). We are proud to be one of only five centres in the country designated as an AHSC. AHSC designation recognises excellence across research, innovation, education and patient service, and in particular the potential to excel in translational medicine. Through partnership with the GM AHSN, MAHSC acts as a beacon within the local health system, providing clinical leadership and helping health care organisations reap the benefits of research and innovation to drive improvements in care.
Our partnership
MAHSC brings together the potential capacity of 23,500 NHS staff and 9,700 academic staff, with the Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences teaching over 9,000 students and almost 6,000 multi-healthcare professionals trained across MAHSC partners. Income from research in the years 2011/12 was £49 million for NHS partners and an additional £77million from health-related academic research.
University: The University of Manchester has pioneered innovations in research, education and clinical care since 1874, when Manchester Medical School was established as the first English medical school outside London. Today the University stands 7th in Europe and 40th worldwide (Shanghai Jiao Tong). In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) UoM was 1st for cancer, dentistry, nursing and midwifery, 2nd in power across UoAs in medical, life and health sciences, and 3rd in research power across all UoAs.
Acute Hospital Trusts: Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CMFT) has a turnover of £850m pa and treats more than 1m patients annually. CMFT partners the University in the NIHR BRU in Musculoskeletal Medicine and the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility; Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust (SRFT) includes the major e-health resource infrastructure of SRFT, with access to primary and secondary care records. SRFT is home to NHS Quest and hosts the Greater Manchester Academic Health Science Network (GM AHSN); University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust (UHSM) treats more than 570k patients every year and hosts regional centres for breast cancer and respiratory research, as well as the NIHR Greater Manchester Comprehensive Local Research Network. The hospital is a major centre for cardiac care including cardiopulmonary transplantation.
Specialist Hospital Trusts: The Christie NHS Foundation Trust (Christie) is the largest cancer centre in Europe and the first in the UK to be officially accredited as a comprehensive cancer centre. A national specialist provider, the Christie has one of the largest early phase trials units worldwide and has been selected by the Department of Health (DH) to host and operate one of two national proton beam therapy units; Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust has secured the 2nd highest NIHR Research funding of all mental health trusts nationally and was recently recognised as providing the safest mental health care in the North West.
Primary Care: Salford Clinical Commissioning Group, established in April 2013, continues the primary care link to MAHSC established by Salford PCT, including the continued operation of the Greater Manchester Primary Care Research Governance Partnership (ReGroup) and eHealth linkage to SRFT.
Vision
Our vision is to work together to improve the health and wellbeing of people locally, regionally, nationally and internationally, by establishing MAHSC as a leading world centre for the translation of innovative research and education into better patient outcomes. Our partners are leaders in their fields individually, but our collaboration is driven by the recognition that we can achieve much more by working together.
Purpose
The purpose of MAHSC is to realise the full potential of our academic-healthcare and wealth creation capabilities, to generate real benefits for people in Greater Manchester, the UK and worldwide.
Goals
The MAHSC partners are committed to common goals, which will enable us to work beyond the parameters of our individual organisations to deliver a shared vision and common purpose by:
MAHSC has a unique strength in Global Health due to its multidisciplinary grouping of academics, NHS partners, links to non-government organisations, volunteers and their partnerships in Manchester, across the northwest, nationally and internationally.
Global health is a growing field of academic study and research. We aim to become an internationally recognised centre of excellence for improving global health, mirroring MAHSC’s principal aims, through the provision of high quality education, research, advice on policies and strategies, and effective collaboration, operating locally, nationally and internationally and focusing particularly on low and middle-income countries (L/MIC). We aim to shape the concept of global health itself; marking out Manchester Global Health as the centre of an international collaborative network of academics and practitioners where the high income established centres work alongside and support the nascent centres in L/MIC towards a common goal of improving health for all.
The Manchester Urban Collaboration on Health (MUCH) is part of the Centre for Epidemiology in the Institute of Population Health within the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre at the University of Manchester. Their mission is to perform world class research that is applicable, not just on a local level but on a national and international level as well.
The MUCH department has recently completed a £3.6 million urban health project entitled European Urban Health Indicator System part 2 (EURO-URHIS 2) which incorporated over forty urban areas across Europe to generate the world's largest data set of urban health indicators on an individual level.
They have a number of local and international projects and have been working with several groups to bring some exciting new events to Manchester; this culminated with the annual Festival of Public Health UK.
The first Festival of Public Health UK was a resounding success and has grown in both size and stature, attracting speakers such as: former Chief Medical Officer for England, Sir Liam Donaldson; Director of the Centre of Public Health at NICE, Professor Mike Kelly; the Director of the World Health Organisation Kobe Centre, Alex Ross; and a whole host of other names synonymous with public health. The Festival works closely with some of the biggest organisations in urban health such as the World Health Organisation, The Health Protection Agency and organisations closer to home such as Macmillan Cancer Awareness and the Christie Foundation Trust.
The Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI) at the University of Manchester is inspired by the need to conduct rigorous research and to support postgraduate training on the impact and outcomes of contemporary and historical crises. Our work is driven by a desire to inform and support policy and decision makers, to optimise joint working between partner organisations, and to foster increased understanding and debate within the field. Bringing together the disciplines of medicine and the humanities to achieve these goals, HCRI aims to facilitate improvements in crisis response on a global scale whilst providing a centre of excellence for all concerned with emergencies and conflicts.
The Institute has developed a novel configuration for research and teaching which uniquely associates practitioners, non-governmental organisation (NGO) partners, theoreticians, policy makers and analysts in sustained intellectual engagement. Combining a targeted programme of research with the provision of timely analysis on current emergencies, the institute seeks to develop new methodologies in the emerging field of humanitarian and conflict response research.
Established in 2007, GURC is a research centre that focuses on critical urban transformations, to inform urban development debates and influence policy and practice.
Building on our extensive expertise, GURC’s research agenda is based around the following themes: Asset accumulation and urban poverty reduction; Urban climate change adaptation; Insecurity, violence and conflict in cities; Transnational migration in cities, and Asset planning in cities.
