2022: Leadership in Times of Global Health Challenges Lectures

Speaker: Professor Stephen Reicher

Lecture: Thursday 20 October, 6pm-8pm

Small-group follow up discussion (credited option only): Wednesday 26 October, 6pm-7pm

At the start of the pandemic, Government leaders assumed that people would lack the ability to sustain the measures necessary to limit infection spread. This reflected a more general assumption that individuals are psychologically fragile and prone to panic in a crisis. What happened was very different, as people came together in communities and the sense of community was critical to pandemic resilience.

This lecture explore:

• the phenomenon of collective resilience
• what leaders can learn more generally about the psychology of community from collective resilience
• how (not) to build inclusive and cohesive communities.

The case of interprofessional healthcare teams

Speaker: Dr Vicky Ward

Lecture: Thursday 27 October 2022, 6pm to 8pm

Small-group follow up discussion (credited option only): Wednesday 2 November, 6pm-7pm

Interprofessional teams are common across landscapes characterised by uncertainty and complexity. They can be a powerful way of bringing together the knowledge and expertise needed to address issues which are not the sole preserve of one profession or organisation. These issues range from the global (how to respond to the COVID19 pandemic) to the local (how to best support individuals with complex health and care needs). Whilst ‘sharing knowledge’ seems a simple task, in reality it is usually fraught with difficulty and it can be challenging to know how best to support knowledge sharing within interprofessional teams.

This lecture will explore:

• the principles underpinning collective knowledge creation
• how interprofessional health and social care teams share and create knowledge
• how interprofessional teams can be supported to share and create knowledge.

Speaker: Dr Muge Cevik

Lecture: Thursday 3 November, 6pm-8pm

Small-group follow up discussion (credited option only): Wednesday 9 November, 6pm-7pm

The Covid-19 pandemic, with its myriad uncertainties, well-publicised retractions, shifting recommendations and over 300 thousand publications, has underscored the importance of carefully synthesising and translating the vast amount of data into evidence-based and actionable insights.

This lecture will:

• provide an overview of the global epidemiology of Covid-19, mainly focusing on disparities in transmission, severity, and outcomes
• summarise the challenging, and often misinterpreted but consequential epidemiological aspects such as asymptomatic transmission, changes in the severity of disease and transmissibility of variants, and the role of vaccination
• focus on better ways to evaluate these areas going forward, particularly from a leadership perspective.

Speaker: Dr Jo Mhairi Hale

Lecture: Thursday 10 November, 6pm-8pm

Small-group follow up discussion (credited option only): Wednesday 16 November, 6pm-7pm

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, the UK government recognized loneliness as ‘‘one of the greatest public health challenges of our time,” with Scotland and England establishing strategies to address the perceived crisis. Germany and Japan have already followed suit, with Sweden and Australia in active discussions, and other higher-income countries likely to consider similar schemes. All of these governments’ commitments to public health interventions are informed by evidence of social isolation and loneliness’s detrimental health impacts. Some research suggests the toll of loneliness may be equivalent to the negative effects of obesity.

This lecture will:

• address the evidence linking loneliness and social isolation with poor health outcomes
• introduce the population processes (e.g., lower fertility rates, geographic mobility, longer life expectancies) that set the stage for this “epidemic of loneliness”
• investigate how age-old socio-political inequalities are likely to intersect with 1) and 2) above to have potentially devastating, long-lasting impacts on health, especially for under-resourced communities
• explore appropriate and reasonable policy interventions.

Think locally, act locally – a new model for managing a global public health network

Speaker: Professor Cynthia Whitney (Emory University)

Lecture: Thursday 17 November, 6pm-8pm

Small-group follow up discussion (credited option only): Wednesday 23 November 2022, 6pm to 7pm

Leading a global public health network requires understanding diverse cultures; conversely, involving local leaders in network decisions can improve success of new initiatives. While traditionally western institutions in high-income countries have led work in low-income settings, global public health opinion leaders are increasingly advocating for “decolonisation” – the concept that work in low- and middle-income countries is directed by local leaders and designed to build and sustain local expertise and capacity.  How does this work in practice?

Using examples from Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS), a 9-country program investigating causes of stillbirths and deaths in children <5 years of age in Africa and South Asia, this lecture will:

• describe the management of a global public health network, including how the Covid-19 pandemic affected operations
• review leading causes of child mortality and discuss the steps required to move from generating data to taking action to prevent child deaths
• explore opportunities to increase local leadership in a global network and the biggest barriers to doing so