Dr.
Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, W.H.O.
(MaximsNewsNetwork)
Margaret Chan (right), Director-General of the World Health Organisation
(WHO), joined by Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, addresses a
press conference on a global plan to save 10 million mothers and children by
2015.
25 September 2008.
United Nations, New York.
UN Photo: Mark Garten
Margaret
Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, addresses a press
conference launching a global initiative to intensify efforts to improve
reproductive, maternal, and newborn health, as part of the lead-up to the
UN's Millennium Development Goal assessment summit being held in
September. 14 April 2010. United
Nations, New York. UN Photo: Mark Garten
Dr.
MARGARET CHAN BIO: DIRECTOR-GENERAL, WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION, W.H.O. (MaximsNewsNetwork)
UNITED NATIONS - / MaximsNews
Network
/ 23 April 2010 - Dr
Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, is among the
key leaders in Global Health that are being profiled by MaximsNewsGlobalHealth as part of its launch to publish news from the United Nations, its agencies and important development organizations.
Dr
Margaret Chan was appointed to the post of Director-General of the World
Health Organization, W.H.O., on 9 November 2006. Her term will run through
June 2012.
Dr Chan, from the People's Republic of China, obtained her medical
degree from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. She joined the Hong
Kong Department of Health in 1978, where her career in public health began.
Dr
Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, WHO,
In
1994, Dr Chan was appointed Director of Health of Hong Kong. In her nine-year
tenure as director, she launched new services to prevent the spread of disease
and promote better health.
She also introduced new initiatives to improve
communicable disease surveillance and response, enhance training for public
health professionals, and establish better local and international
collaboration.
She effectively managed outbreaks of avian influenza and of
severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
In
2003, Dr Chan joined WHO as Director of the Department for Protection of the
Human Environment.
In June 2005, she was appointed Director, Communicable
Diseases Surveillance and Response as well as Representative of the
Director-General for Pandemic Influenza.
In September 2005, she was named
Assistant Director-General for Communicable Diseases.
MaximsNewsNetwork: 07 April 2010 -
WHO - UNAMA: Geneva - Marking World Health Day 2010, the World
Health Organization (WHO) today (7 April) issued five calls to action to
build a healthy and safe urban environment.
Margaret Chan, World Health
Organization Director General: "In every corner of the world,
certain city dwellers suffer, they suffer disproportionately from poor
health and these inequities can be traced back to the differences in
their social and living conditions.
"Ladies and gentlemen,
cities are growing larger and larger and their populations of the poor are
growing larger even faster.
"One of the best
ways to measure urban harm, is really to look at the gaps in health
outcomes between the rich and the poor living in the same cities,
sometimes just a few blocks between them.
"Most obviously the
health consequence of poverty and squalid living conditions are
contagious in a city setting.
"They are
detrimental to all city dwellers. In developing countries, the best
urban governance can help produce 75 years or more of life expectancy
but poor urban governance, life expectancy can be as low as 35 years."
Interview
on taking office as Director-General (4 January 2007)
As
she prepared to take office as WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan in an
interview reflected on her priorities, her new responsibilities and on the
challenges that lie ahead.
1.
What are your priorities as you take office?
I
have identified six core areas for the Organization in the years ahead:
development for health, health security, health systems capacity, information
and knowledge, and the last two would be partnership and performance of the
Organization as a whole. These six core areas capture what I see as important
functions of the Organization as we move ahead. Some 60 years ago when the
World Health Organization was established, WHO was the Organization in
international health. But when you look at the landscape now, it is very
different. There are many key players who are quite influential, so WHO needs
to reflect on these recent changes and see how best we can leverage our core
capacities, building on our mandate, the trust placed in us by Member States,
as well as our very strong track record of excellent performance.
2.
How can WHO best work and coordinate with the other key players in global
health?
We
must stay in our core business. WHO is the United Nations specialized agency
on health. Our mandate states very clearly that we are the coordinating and
convening body in international health and we have a strong and excellent
record of performance in terms of our normative function. To give one example,
the new and revised International Health Regulations gives us a new instrument
to work with our partners and deal with major public health emergencies. But
we need to ask ourselves, when you have so many other players, what is our
relationship with them? We have to find a way to work with our different
partners. So what are the principles that would guide us? I think it is
important that we have a shared vision, that we can add value and that we can
get synergy from all these partnerships. If you look at the number of
partnerships the Organization has, I'm just surprised. How can we manage all
these partnerships? The transaction costs are very high. We need to be honest
with ourselves and ask the question, are all these partnerships still
relevant? If not, either the partnerships have to change or we have to change
or both of us have to change to be more relevant. What is important to me is,
are we getting the results that matter? Are we doing the right things to make
an impact on the health of the populations that we are serving? These
questions have to be asked.
"Ladies and gentlemen,
cities are growing larger and larger and their populations of the poor are
growing larger even faster.
"One of the best
ways to measure urban harm, is really to look at the gaps in health
outcomes between the rich and the poor living in the same cities,
sometimes just a few blocks between them.
"Most obviously the
health consequence of poverty and squalid living conditions are
contagious in a city setting.
"They are
detrimental to all city dwellers. In developing countries, the best
urban governance can help produce 75 years or more of life expectancy
but poor urban governance, life expectancy can be as low as 35 years."
Interview
on taking office as Director-General (4 January 2007)
As
she prepared to take office as WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan in an
interview reflected on her priorities, her new responsibilities and on the
challenges that lie ahead.
1.
What are your priorities as you take office?
I
have identified six core areas for the Organization in the years ahead:
development for health, health security, health systems capacity, information
and knowledge, and the last two would be partnership and performance of the
Organization as a whole. These six core areas capture what I see as important
functions of the Organization as we move ahead. Some 60 years ago when the
World Health Organization was established, WHO was the Organization in
international health. But when you look at the landscape now, it is very
different. There are many key players who are quite influential, so WHO needs
to reflect on these recent changes and see how best we can leverage our core
capacities, building on our mandate, the trust placed in us by Member States,
as well as our very strong track record of excellent performance.
2.
How can WHO best work and coordinate with the other key players in global
health?
We
must stay in our core business. WHO is the United Nations specialized agency
on health. Our mandate states very clearly that we are the coordinating and
convening body in international health and we have a strong and excellent
record of performance in terms of our normative function. To give one example,
the new and revised International Health Regulations gives us a new instrument
to work with our partners and deal with major public health emergencies. But
we need to ask ourselves, when you have so many other players, what is our
relationship with them? We have to find a way to work with our different
partners. So what are the principles that would guide us? I think it is
important that we have a shared vision, that we can add value and that we can
get synergy from all these partnerships. If you look at the number of
partnerships the Organization has, I'm just surprised. How can we manage all
these partnerships? The transaction costs are very high. We need to be honest
with ourselves and ask the question, are all these partnerships still
relevant? If not, either the partnerships have to change or we have to change
or both of us have to change to be more relevant. What is important to me is,
are we getting the results that matter? Are we doing the right things to make
an impact on the health of the populations that we are serving? These
questions have to be asked.
3.
You have set out your six priority areas. Will the structure of WHO now change
to mirror these priorities?
I
have been working with my transition team on the important functionalities
required to deliver those priorities. My initial thinking is that structure
has to follow function. I have identified the health of people in Africa and
the health of women as important indicators to measure the impact we make.
That does not necessarily mean I will set up new programmes or new clusters to
deal with these priorities. It is all about working in a cross-cutting manner
between programmes and between clusters so that we can get synergy. It's all
about how we do our business and about our performance.
4.
You have said you want to make an impact on the health of women and people in
Africa. What will you do to ensure that these populations are the ones most
affected by WHO's work?
We
already place a lot of importance on achieving the Millennium Development
Goals. If you look at those goals, many of them will contribute to improving
the health of people in Africa - HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for
example. There is another MDG goal dealing with maternal health, which I would
link to the Goal for the health of children. Children's health depends on the
mothers, so if we can scale up the achievement of the MDGs, it would benefit
people in Africa. We should also look at how we can empower women to leverage
their resources and their creativity and become change agents. We have seen
example after example where women who are appropriately motivated and given
the right environment can make changes, not only to themselves but also to
their families and their communities.
5.
How do you feel personally about becoming Director-General?
I
feel very honoured and very privileged to be given this opportunity to serve
the 193 Member States from the post of Director-General. It is also a great
responsibility that I take very seriously. These are my personal feelings, but
on the other hand I am very happy and feel honoured to be able to work with a
group of very talented people in the Organization. WHO has a strong track
record of performance. When I was working in Hong Kong, shall we say on the
other side of the table, I always looked to WHO as a very efficient and
effective organization. Whenever I had problems with new and emerging
infections, the first organization I would think of was always WHO and time
and again WHO has responded very promptly and effectively.
6.
You are known as the woman who fought SARS and avian influenza in Hong Kong.
What else in your background is important as you begin this job?
If
you look at my work in almost 30 years of public health, I have covered all
areas. I have worked in health policy, in chronic disease prevention and
control, in food and drug regulation and of course anti-tobacco work. My first
job was actually taking care of children and pregnant women. There are two
things that I feel very happy about from my tenure as Director of Health in
Hong Kong: we introduced primary health care and preventive services from
conception to old age; and we worked with herbalists to put Traditional
Chinese Medicine on a firm footing of promotion, development and regulation.
Looking ahead, the challenges are huge but so are the opportunities. We have
never seen such a high level of political commitment and we have never seen so
many resources invested in health. So we should seize the opportunities and
work with our partners and see how to move forward.
7.
You have said before that lack of resources and lack of political commitment
are the "true killers". What can you do to ensure sufficient
resources and sufficient commitment to do what needs to be done?
There
are unprecedented investments in health, particularly linked to development,
and also political commitment. If you look at the discussions taking place
between presidents, prime ministers, and also in New York at the United
Nations, health is always there. It is important that WHO has a full and
active engagement with leaders in donor communities, with foundations, to
convince them to invest in the right areas. Having said that, WHO also needs
to work with Member States and support them to develop plans where they have
ownership, plans that they can fully implement and then jointly we can go and
do resource mobilization. But at the end of the day, donors would like to see
results that benefit the health of people. I'm pretty confident that when
people see results, when confidence is enhanced, resources will flow in. At
the end of the day, we are being held accountable to what we promised to
deliver.
8.
You are just starting this job, but if you look to the future, how would you
like to be remembered at the end of your term?
I
would like to be remembered as a very fair, open, transparent and accountable
Director-General. And I would of course like to be able to achieve what I set
out to achieve at the end of my term in those six important areas and make WHO
a much more efficient and relevant organization.
~~~~~
MaximsNewsGlobalHealth
is being launched this month to publish news on such Global Health issues as
hunger, HIV/AIDS, childhood mortality, maternal health, environmental health,
malaria and other diseases.
MaximsNewsGlobalHealthis publishing news from
the U.N., its agencies and important development organizations and presenting
it within the context of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs).
