The Department of Operational Medicine of the Medical School of University of Pécs is organising a Vaccination Roundtable event as part of the Global Immunisation Week of the World Health Organisation on 30th April, 2019.

The motto of the WHO program is "Protected Together, #VaccinesWork".

The Department is a WHO Collaborating Centre and annually takes part of the Immunization Week. The program addresses the problems of anti-vaccination movements and the recent outbreaks of Measles.

The event will take place in the Dean's Conference-Room at the Medical School of University of Pécs, from 10:30 to 14:10 30th April. The introductory address will be given by Dr. Ledia Lazeri, head of WHO Country office in Hungary. The language of the event will be predominantly Hungarian, but intentionally is bilingual along with English. 

REACHING CONSENSUS ON MIGRATION HEALTH DATA

In order to facilitate the realization of those tasks highlighted in numerous high level documents and declarations as well as acting in line with our WCC TOR, we propose that University of Pécs Medical School and its WCC, in cooperation with WHO EURO PHAME program and with the support and participation of the Government of Hungary, will organize a WHO EURO level symposium in 2019. The main goal of this event is to bring together leading experts in migrant health with the aim of working out the basic principles of a highly coherent and consistent European Migrant Health Database, as an essential tool for the ‘evidence based’ planning and development of public health and health care systems that are prepared and capable to address the new challenges.  In line with our WCC’s other tasks and capacity, we may offer to develop and run training program as well for building the necessary human resource capacity in this field.

The title of the symposium will be the following Migration related health/public health challenges and needed responses – defining conditions for establishing a European level migration health database – a consensus conference and it will be held in Pécs, Hungary between mid September and early October, 2019.

We plan to organize plenary sessions as well as workshops dealing with connected issues. During the plenary sessions we will be introduced to an overview of WHO , ECDC, DG Santé, EUPHA migrant health statements, declarations and other related documents; overview of the already existing country level migrant health databases in WHO European Region, related endowers in Hungary, and experiences in the USA (CDC); feedback from the workshops and plenary level discussion of their proposals and the Drafting Committee introduces the Proposal for establishing a European Level Migration Health Database. Discussion and adoption of the document. The parallel workshops will cover the following issues,

• What kind of data should be collected? Data sources. (WHO, ECDC, EUPHA statements and proposals and overview of the related Member States level legislation and practices);
• Best practices – overview of the European and non-European practices, checking compatibility possibilities – composing suggestions;
• IT conditions for establishing a Europewide compatible and accessible database;
• Conditions for transferable migrant health data; legal, human rights and personality protection aspects – the way how to cope with them;
• How the necessary human resource could be provided/built – principles and structure of the training program;

The participation on the conference will be free of charge for a number of participants; registration will be open by the end of the year. For more information, please contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Last December, I participated in a ShipCon Training in Palermo titled ICT SKills in Education funded by Erasmus plus staff mobility program. The training lasted for 5 days and during that we developed three projects in groups. I got the opportunity to lead one of these project groups which was a great challenge, however the assigned tasks proved to be very useful. One of the tasks was to solve an HR related matter by using Edmodo and online platforms only. The second one was to create a video with Filmora video editor about our daily work and free time in Palermo, and finally, we learned how to develop a structured folder for an EU project with the support of Dropbox. All these tools are very engaging, creative and can be used effectively in order to save time as well. We were also introduced to a Belbin test that let us form project groups with a mixture of people with different sets of skills ensuring the effectiveness of our groupwork.

We have not only participated in the course, but made fruitful connections as well. We also visited monuments in the city of Palermo in our free time and took part in an organized trip to Erice. As I stayed a weekend longer I also had a chance to visit Mount Etna and experience the ongoing eruptions. 

Nikolett Arnold, our staff member has been elected to the Board of European Network of Intercultural Elderly Care (ENIEC) last year.

As an ENIEC member, the first board meeting of the year took place on 16-17 January in Tallinn. During the meeting not only the organization of the next Annual Meeting in Bristol had been discussed, but we also met stakeholders in the City of Tallinn in the hope of future collaboration with Estonian institutes, such as the Estonian Institute of Population Studies, the Integration Foundation and the Social Welfare and Healthcare Deaprtment. Our Estonian-Finnish colleague, Siiri Jakson helped us and coordinated the meeting.

The University of Pecs Medical School invites you to participate on the conference titled

 Consensus Conference - Migration related health/ public health challenges and the necessary response: The conditions for establishing European level Migration Health Database

Towards establishing common standards for collecting, storing and sharing data on migrant health 

The conference will be held in Pécs, Hungary on 11-13 April 2018with the support ofWHO Europe Regional Officeand theMinistry of Human Capacities.  

The participation on the conference will be free of charge for a number of participants; registration will be open by the end of the year. For more information, please contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit our website https://www.mighealth-unipecs.hu/.

The University of Pécs Medical School Department of Migration Health has launched the Specialist in Migration Health course this fall. The course is full-time postgraduate training course for students who already have at least a Bachelor’s degree in a one of the specified fields. The course is a 120 ECTS course that is built up of 6 modules:

• clinical and public health assessment;
• epidemiology and research methodology;
• environmental medicine and occupational health;
• economic / health economic impact of migration;
• organization and systems management;
• social and behavioural aspects of migration including multicultural, multireligious aspects and their health/ mental health impact.

We are delighted that we were able to kick-off this course as the finishing point of an Erasmus LLP that focused on the development of the course with a consortium of 6 leading univerisities from Europe:

• Danube University Krems
• Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice
• Medizinische Universität Graz
• Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald
• University of East Anglia
• Univeristy of Pécs

We launched the first program only in English language, however next September we would like to start both in English and Hungarian

The leading topic of IARM’s jubilee congress – joining to WHO ‘Healthy Ageing’ program – was the health status and the tasks of the social and health care institutions for elderly people worldwide.  From Hungary Prof. Dr. István Szilárd and Dr. Zoltán Katz assistant professor have participated in the event as invited speakers. They both led a sixty minutes seminar for Japanese colleagues about the health status of and service conditions for the Hungarian elderly population and ageing Roma ethnic minorities.

The Congress has elected Prof. Dr. István Szilárd for vice president of IARM and it has accepted the invitation of the University of Pécs Medical School and its next, WHO Europe level conference – with the participation of Japan as well – will be held in Pécs in 2020.

The European Office of WHO in cooperation with the government of Italy and with the leadership of the Sicily Region has organized a five-day training about the health/ public health aspects of migration.  Around eighty participants were representing not only the European region, but there were students from Japan and from South-America as well.  The training staff was composed of the leading experts of this field. It was a special experience to see the simulation how an Italian coast-guard rescues refugees from the see. From our Medical School Professor Dr István Szilárd has contributed to the training. His lecture was providing an overview about the tasks and work of the WHO Collaborating Centre on Migration Health Training and Research that is functioning within the frame of the Department of Operational Medicine.

The Migration Health Team of the University of Pécs organizes a roundtable titled Immunization round-table for strengthening policies, emphasizing achievements.
and discussing current and future challenges on the 24th of April. The program is connected to the WHO – world immunization week 24 – 30 April - which aims to highlight the collective action needed to
ensure that every person is protected from vaccine-preventable diseases. This year's theme: “Protected Together, #VaccinesWork”;

The program will be bilingual, we will interpret the presentations held in Hungarian for our guests who speak English.

Please, find the official program enclosed and register through the specified email address until 21 April 2018.

The Operational Medicine Department has been collecting shoebox presents for the children of a small roma community in Gilvanfa for the past years. This year, we are awaiting donations until the 14th of December. In case you decide to offer something (toys, candies, cosmetics) please bring your shoebox with the age and gender of the child you wish to surprise. There is also a donations box, if you wish to send them money instead. Thank you!