Health is a Human Right

Sir Alexander Macara

Sir Alexander is a physician in public health and has recently retired from the University of Bristol Medical School as a Consultant Senior Lecturer in Public Health and Epidemiology, a job he has done for 34 years. He has worked at every level in the NHS and in Local Government.  Sir Alexander was the Chairman of Council of the BMA from 1993 to 1998, and previously of its Medical Ethics Committee and Representative Body.
He has been an elected member of the GMC for 21 years. He was responsible for building up the Association of Schools of Public Health in Europe (ASPHER) and was the secretary-general from 1975 to 1989. He has also been a WHO Consultant since 197O. Today, he is still active in the BMA international and public health work, and in Committee of Doctors in the European Union. Sir Alexander is also the Chairman of the National Heart Forum.

Dr Julian Sheather
Senior ethics adviser, the British Medical Association

Dr Julian Sheather is a senior ethics adviser at the British Medical Association. His particular interests lie in mental health and mental capacity, in consent and capacity issues in relation to children and young people and in public health ethics. He is the BMA's policy lead on child protection and on health and human rights. Julian has worked in the BMA Ethics Department for four years following a spell as a researcher in international health policy for the BMA's International Department. He is a co-author of Medical Ethics Today, the BMA's handbook on medical ethics and medical law, and is a regular contributor to The Journal of Medical Ethics. He sits on the British Medical Journal’s ethics committee, and lectures widely on a range of topics in medical ethics.

Dr Michael Wilks
Chairman and Representative Body of the British Medical Association

Michael Wilks worked as a GP in West London from 1977 to 1992.  He then specialised in Forensic Medicine, and is now a Senior Forensic Medical Examiner in the Metropolitan Police.

Michael has been a member of the BMA’s Medical Ethics Committee (MEC) since 1994, and chaired the committee for nine years until September 2006.  He is Chairman of the BMA’s policy-making forum, the Representative Body.  During his period of chairmanship the MEC addressed such issues as organ donation, organ retention, stem cell research and end of life treatment.  He is a member of the Patient Information advisory Group.  More recently he has been active in exposing the abuse and torture of detainees and Guantanamo Bay, and working on Right to Health issues with other human rights groups.

Dr Peter Hall
NHS Specialist in gastroenterology, physical healthcare for people with learning disabilities and in palliative care.

Dr. Peter Hall works full time in the NHS specialising in gastroenterology, physical healthcare for people with learning disabilities, and in palliative care.

He was a founder member of Physicians for Human Rights-UK in 1989, and has been chair since 1996. PHR-UK, which changed its name to Doctors for Human Rights in 2004, channels the humanity, influence and special skills of the medical profession into the protection of human rights around the world.
He participated in fact finding investigations in Kuwait/Iraq, Palestine, and Egypt and is one of only three human rights people to document massacres in Rwanda itself during the 1994 genocide. He played an important role in developing UN General Comment 14 on the right to the highest attainable standard of health, and is a leading advocate for the integration of health and human rights into healthcare, recognising that the discipline has the potential to prevent more suffering and premature death worldwide than any other
project.

Nathan Geffen
Treatment Action Campaign Manager

Nathan Geffen has worked with the Treatment Action Campaign since 2000 as a volunteer, web-designer, treasurer, national manager and currently director of research and communications. He has published a number of articles on HIV and human rights, as well as on economics and HIV. Geffen has an MSc in Computer Science and before working for TAC, lectured computer science at UCT and worked as a software engineer.

One of his fondest memories with TAC was participating in the planning and execution of the importation of generic fluconazole into South Africa in violation of Pfizer's patent. Geffen believes this action elevated the access to medicine debate to the forefront of public discussion

Tobacco

Dr Anna Gilmore
Clinical Lecturer in Public Health, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Dr Anna Gilmore is a clinical senior lecturer in the European Centre on Health of Societies in Transition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where she heads the centre’s tobacco control work. She is a public health clinician with particular expertise in tobacco control, an area in which she has published widely. Her current research interests focus on the wider determinants of health, in particular the impact of trade policies and macroeconomic change on public health. She was recently awarded a prestigious Health Foundation Clinician Scientist Fellowship to continue her work on tobacco. She is also a board member of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), a member of the Royal College of Physician’s Tobacco Advisory Group and sits on the Editorial Advisory Board of Tobacco Control.

The predatory practices of the tobacco transnationals
Anna has spent some of the past few years examining previously secret tobacco industry documents released through litigation to gain a better understanding of the tobacco industry. These documents have exposed some the tobacco industry’s darker secrets. Her presentation will use these documents to explore how the industry has denied the health consequences of smoking, deceived customers, directed advertising to young people, developed new markets and destroyed legislation. The last two will be explored using a case study of British American Tobacco’s investment in Uzbekistan.

Professor Gerard Hastings
Director, Institute for Social Marketing
Director, the Centre for Tobacco Control, the Stirling University

Gerard Hastings is the first UK Professor of Social Marketing and founder/director of two research centres: the Institute for Social Marketing (1993) and the Centre for Tobacco Control Research (1999). These are based at the University of Stirling under a joint venture agreement with the Open University. The Institute for Social Marketing researches the applicability of marketing principles such as consumer orientation and relationship building to the solution of health and social problems. It also conducts critical marketing research into the impact of potentially health damaging marketing, such as tobacco advertising and fast food promotion. Gerard is an Advisor to the World Health Organisation, and sits on the FCTC (Framework Convention on Tobacco Control) Cross Board Advertising Committee. He is also an expert witness in litigation against the tobacco industry, and provides regular guidance on social and critical marketing to the Scottish, UK and European Parliaments. 

Professor Hastings will discuss the strategic thrust of the tobacco industry and will try to look forward using BAT as a case study.

Natural Disasters and NGOs

John Cunningham
Head of international operations, Wales and West Country, the British Red Cross

Migration of Healthcare Workers

Dr Robert Pond
Health metrics, World Health Organization

Dr Robert Pond is a public health physician trained in general practice (California), medical epidemiology (the U.S. Centers for Disease Control) and health policy and finance (with a MSc. from London School of Economics/London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine). For 12 of the last 25 years he has worked in sub-Saharan Africa, coordinating public health assistance.  Bob now works with the Health Metrics Network, headquartered at the World Health Organization in Geneva, focusing in particular on strategies to improve the monitoring of the health workforce.

Bob's work on health worker migration began with a WHO-funded collaborative research study along with Professor Barbara McPake of the Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. A key finding form this research, which was ultimately published in the
Lancet, is that immigration of health workers is largely driven by policies in host countries rather than economic or demographic factors beyond the control of governments.  "... we are not at the mercy of market forces. Policies have driven demand for health workers that has outstripped national supply over at least some period in all four countries, and policies can intervene to reduce the degree of immigration of health workers from low-income countries. To avoid exploitation of the training expenditures of poorer countries, at national level in higher-income countries we need, importantly, to bring into balance (1) demand that is ever increasing (as a result of the familiar forces of growing economies, expanding technologies, and ageing populations) but is also highly responsive to public expenditure plans, cost containment policy, and political support for health care delivery models such as managed care; (2) numbers in training almost wholly a policy variable in all four countries except when training quotas or their equivalents are not filled and (3) pay and employment conditions, which in countries such as the UK are largely determined by policymakers and in countries such as the USA, where private sector employment dominates, are largely market-determined.”

Mike Rowson
Freelance Consultant and honorary lecturer at the international Health and Medical Education Centre at University College London.

Mike Rowson was a managing editor of Global Health Watch 2005-2006: An
Alternative World Health Report (www.ghwatch.org). He was formerly
Executive Director of international health charity Medact (www.medact.org) and now writes on international health issues. He is also a teaching fellow at the Centre for International Health and Development (formerly IHMEC), University College London.

Professor Maureen Mackintosh
External Co-ordinator for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development
Professor of Economics, the Open University

Professor Maureen Mackintosh’s research includes a WHO funded research project led by Professor Richard Biritwum, Professor of Community Medicine at the University of Ghana Medical School, on the Costs of Out-Migration of Health Care Staff from Ghana. Also coordinating a collaborative ESRC-funded project on Non-governmental public action to improve access by the poor to good quality low cost medicines, part of the ESRC non-governmental public action research programme, with Professor Sudip Chaudhuri, Dr Phares Mujinja and Dr Meri Koivusalo. She is also a board member of the International Development Centre at the Open University.

Dr Mandela Thyoka
Specialist Registrar in General Surgery
A member of the diaspora from Milawi

Mandela Thyoka is a Specialist Registrar in General Surgery. He was trained at St Andrews University, University of London and University of Malawi. Dr Thyoka spent time working in a district hospital in Zomba, Malawi, before joining a private practice at the Blantyre Adventist Hospital in 1998. He took time off from mainstream surgical training to be a lead clinical fellow for a large randomised clinical trial into the management of septic arthritis in Malawian children. This trial compared aspiration and open washout treatment of septic arthritis. His work has been published several eminent journals. Dr Thyoka has attained membership of College of Surgeons of East, Central and Southern Africa (COSECSA) in 2003 and from The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 2004. Since 2004, he has been doing higher surgical training as a Specialist Registrar in General Surgery at the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. Dr Thoka’s main active areas outside surgical practice include advocacy (member of Malawi Health Equity Network, MHEN), sports medicine (team doctor for the Malawi national football team 1996-1998) and was a board member of Medical Council of Malawi. He is married to a Malawian wife, Dr Tumpale Mhango.