The LHO is often asked to share its learning and experience of being a public health observatory with public health colleagues outside the UK.

You may be interested in the guide we have compiled to establishing a regional public health observatory.

These pages contain presentations made at some of the key workshops that have taken place recently. You may also be interested in our Megapoles work.

A conference to examine the development of indicators to measure the impact of the current recession on health and wellbeing was held in London jointly by the North East Public Health Observatory and the London Health Observatory to:

1. Bring together national and international expertise to provide an overview of the evidence of the short and long term impacts of recession on health and health care needs;
2. Discuss current knowledge and feasibility of health and wellbeing indications and their use for monitoring;
3. Identify research and evidence from a range of countries (EU and others e.g. Canada);
4. Determine the feasibility and desirability of the development of a health and wealth database;
5. Identify resources needed to undertake the database development and maintenance;
6. Consider how existing evidence of positive social protection polices might be disseminated to policy makers and decision makers at national, regional and local level following the Marmot review.

Speakers at this event were:

• Professor Martin McKee – European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies.
  Presentation: The recession and the response to it
  
• Dr David Stuckler – Research Fellow, Oxford University and LSHTM.
  Presentation: An overview of recent work on the impact of recession on health
  
• Professor Clare Bambra – Professor of Public Health Policy, Durham University.
  Presentation: Economic recession and health: good, bad or ugly for health?
  
• Dr Bernard Ledésert – Director, Regional Health Observatory Languedoc-Roussillon.
  Presentation: An overview of the French experience of Recession and its influence on health and health inequalities
  
• Dr Cory Neudorf – Chief Medical Health Officer, Saskatoon Health Region.
  Presentation: Economic recession in Canada and its influence on health and health inequalities
  
• Hannah Stoker – NHS Management Trainee, NEPHO.
  Presentation: Indicators and database development
  

Selected presentations at this workshop are available to download.

Representatives from the Lithuanian Ministry of Health and three municipal health bureaux, accompanied by staff from the WHO, visited the London Health Observatory in April 2009 as part of a study tour to learn from the UK experience in tackling health inequalities.

The key objectives were to:

1. Explore the role and function of public health observatories
2. Gain familiarity with the research, tools and capacity building activities of the public health observatories.
3. Understand funding and operational management of public health observatories.

Presentations made by the LHO are available to download.

A two day workshop 'Public Health Observatories; Learning from our World neighbours' was held in Gateshead, England in November 2008. The workshop brought together people working in public health observatories in Canada, France, Belgium, Australia and England.

The workshop had the following themes:

1. Sharing best practice in PHO development.
2. A comparison of health and health care in World Regions and Cities.
3. Sharing of innovative developments in analysis, surveillance systems or web based tools.

The presentations and outcomes from the conferences can be found in the resources below.