Institutional Collaborations

New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human DevelopmentThe annual three week Summer Institute on “Integrated Marketing Communication for Behavioural Impact (IMC/COMBI) in Health and Social Development” is conducted by the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, New York University. WHO has collaborated with New York University since 2000 on this training programme. The course will be of interest to health communication/promotion/education/social mobilization staff and senior programme managers in Ministries of Health, UN agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations. The course focuses on the central challenge of achieving behavioural impact in health and draws upon experiences from the private sector approach of Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) and on WHO's experience in applying the COMBI approach over the last decade. For further details see: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/imc/ or contact combi@who.int

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The Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN)The Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) was established in April 2000 by the World Health Organization (WHO), and technical institutions and networks to strengthen the coordination and deployment of multi-disciplinary teams to assist countries in outbreak response. The primary aims of this network of technical institutions and networks are to ensure that appropriate technical support for outbreak response is available rapidly to countries to investigate and characterize events, assess risks of rapidly emerging epidemic diseases; and to strengthen outbreak preparedness by ensuring that acute responses contribute to sustained containment of epidemic threats. GOARN works closely with the COMBI network through the COMBI staff and activities of the WHO Department of Global Alert and Response (GAR). Training in applying COMBI to social mobilization interventions for outbreak response is provided to potential international team members in GOARN pre-deployment training courses. Since its inception, GOARN has provided the operational framework for technical partners to respond to major infectious disease outbreaks, including avian influenza, cholera, dengue, encephalitis, leptospirosis, meningitis, plague, SARS, viral haemorrhagic fevers, yellow fever, and other emerging pathogens such as Nipah virus. COMBI experts have been deployed to provide technical support for outbreaks in Angola, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mauritius, Nigeria, Niger, Sudan, Turkey and Yemen. Currently GOARN can drawn on the resources and capacities of over 300 existing technical networks and institutions to support the deployment of international outbreak response field teams and experts . For more information on GOARN visit the website on: http://www.who.int/csr/outbreaknetwork/en/

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The Global Health Communications Centre Indiana University Purdue University School of Liberal ArtsThe Global Health Communication Center (GHCC) is a center for research and practice dedicated to improving global public health. In collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), the GHCC strives to create greater access to health care and better health care practices through effective health communication. A major focus of the GHCC is to train public health officials in how to conduct health campaigns using the WHO planning framework “Communication for Behavioral Impact (COMBI). The GHCC was created in 2006 by Dr. John Parrish-Sprowl of the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts as a center that would work with WHO to promote the use of COMBI, evaluate its effectiveness, and support partners to continuously improve on health communication practices. The GHCC is committed to promoting healthy behaviors in peoples’ lives through evidence-based, strategically applied communication. There is a great deal of both experience and research that is used to improve health care delivery through better communication practices, however, there is often a neglect to invest in capacity and systems that support the integration of health communication as part of health service planning and delivery. By combining the efforts of the GHCC with WHO we hope to accelerate access to COMBI and other best practices in an effort to contribute to tangible positive health outcomes in public health programmes around the world.