15 November 2020
One of the world's top four general medical journals, The BMJ, and the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH), Qatar Foundation's global health initiative, today launched a series of collections to help advance knowledge on toxic stress in children, healthy dry cities, and the relationship between climate change and communicable diseases.
The collections are each chaired by world-leading experts and supported by a team of senior leaders from the academic, research, and policy arenas. They will be launched during this week's biennial WISH summit - a global healthcare meeting dedicated to capturing and disseminating the best evidence-based ideas and practices.
Professor Kamran Abbasi, Executive Editor of The BMJ, said: "We are delighted to have the opportunity to work on these important areas with the support of WISH. Our expert teams have produced exceptional reports with clear recommendations for health professionals and policy makers.
The challenge now is to act on these recommendations to counter the impacts on health of toxic stress, climate change, and water shortage. This year's summit will play an important part in moving those issues from research into policy."
Under this new partnership, The BMJ has worked with WISH on three collections that include peer-reviewed academic papers written by global experts from across The BMJ community. In addition to being presented at WISH 2020, these papers will be published in the journal, benefiting from the scale and reach of its international readership of doctors and other health professionals. This year alone, bmj.com had 5.5m page views from 2.7m users. On social media, the journal has a loyal following of 105k on Facebook and 422.5k on Twitter.
Sultana Afdhal, Chief Executive Officer of WISH Qatar, said: "One of the goals of our biennial summits is to find optimal ways for evidence-based research to be translated into practical policy-driven solutions that help deliver healthcare in an efficient and cost-effective manner worldwide. It is, therefore, fitting that we work with a trusted knowledge-leader such as The BMJ, as a research and publishing partner, given our mutual commitment to sharing evidence-based knowledge and supporting healthcare leaders in building healthier communities and improving health outcomes."
The report on toxic stress and PTSD in children provides an opportunity to consider the effects of long-term stress on children's physical and mental development and develop strategies to mitigate these ill-effects. The forum is being co-chaired by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, Surgeon General of California, and Prof. Zulfiqar A. Bhutta, Co-Director of the Centre for Global Child Health, The Hospital for Sick Children and Founding Director of the Centre of Excellence in Women and Child Health, Aga Khan University.
The group has been convened by The BMJ to consider the relationship between climate change and communicable diseases will highlight global health responses shown to be effective in curbing the impact of climate change on the spread of infectious disease and climate-linked increases in communicable diseases, as well as considering how to fill the gaps in the current body of evidence. The forum is co-chaired by Prof. Rachel Lowe, Associate Professor and Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Prof. Jeremy Hess, Professor in Emergency Medicine, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, and Global Health, and Adjunct Professor, Atmospheric Sciences, and Director, Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHanGE), University of Washington.
The team behind the report looking at the topic of healthy dry cities is co-chaired by Prof. Howard Frumkin, Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington School of Public Health, and Dr. Maitreyi Bordia Das, Practice Manager and Global Lead at the World Bank. The report aims to identify the most effective strategies for optimizing public health policy in tackling urban water shortage.
This year's virtual WISH will extend over five days from 16-21 November, and, for the first time, registration is open to all participants free of cost. Among the discussions on global health challenges will be a number of sessions on Covid-19, which has inevitably dominated discourse around global health this year. To register for virtual WISH 2020, for free, visit www.wish.org.qa.
