Sir Michael Marmot, world-renowned expert on social determinants and President of the World Medical Association, will be the keynote speaker at a conference on health professional regulation to be held in Geneva by the world’s health professions.
He will discuss the new Sustainable Development Goals announced last year by the World Health Organisation and how they and the social determinants of health impact on health workforce and regulation.
The conference, to be held on May 21 and 22, is being organised by the World Health Professions Alliance WHPA, a body that brings together the International Council of Nurses, International Pharmaceutical Federation, World Confederation for Physical Therapy, FDI World Dental Federation and World Medical Association. Together, these five disciplines represent more than 600 national member organisations.
The conference, entitled ‘Health professional regulation – facing challenges to acting in the public interest’, will be held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel and will be addressed by speakers from across the world.
Sir Michael, Director of the Institute of Health Equity at UCL, University of London, and a world-renowned expert on the social determinants of health, has spent his research life showing that the key determinants of health lie outside the health care system in the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. He will talk about how inequities in power, money and resources give rise to the inequities in conditions of daily life.
He says: “The way we organise our affairs at the community or whole societal level are matters of life and death. As health care professionals, we cannot stand idly by while our patients suffer from the way our societies are organised. Inequality of social and economic conditions is at the heart of it.”
