Newsletter 28 - February 2009 — Oxford Health Alliance

OxHA news and highlights

Click here >> for a pdf of this newsletter.

Message from the executive director

We are pleased that the end of January saw the launch of a new website for CIH (www.cih.net) – we encourage you to look at the site, and let us know your comments.

OxHA has been involved with some interesting events – co-sponsoring the Changing Diabetes Barometer International Seminar, and hosting an event at which Dr Derek Yach spoke on 'How food and beverage companies help improve population health: some insights from PepsiCo.’

The MEND programme in Denmark, with which OxHA is partnering, has had some very impressive first-year results.

The project spotlight is the Global Corporate Challenge, a workplace health initiative that challenges teams of employees to walk 'around the world' – OxHA will be taking part, so you’ll be hearing more about this!

We will soon be sending our members details of an innovative fundraising tool for OxHA.

Stig Pramming

3FOUR50

As well as the launch of the CIH microsite (www.cih.net), new additions to the 3FOUR50 website include:

highlights of an OxHA seminar, ‘How food and beverage companies help improve population health’, with speaker Dr Derek Yach: click here >>
video of Sainsbury’s Active Kids event, attended by Christine Hancock: click here >>

The American Cancer Society will be sponsoring the video news for four months from February.

Community Interventions for Health

After several months of development, a CIH microsite (click here >>) has been launched to document the progress of each CIH team through stories, photos and videos. The main pages are currently available in English, Hindi, Spanish and Mandarin, so that members of the communities undergoing interventions can read about the CIH project in their own language. The site was launched to the general public on 30 January. We hope that you will visit the site and give us your feedback (click here >> to email us).

Baseline data collection is currently onging in India, China and Mexico. The Evaluation Team is already analysing the baseline data collected during their autumn field visits and the first 200 community surveys from each site to get a preliminary snapshot of each community.

Preparations are under way to hold a meeting with the CIH sites and Intervention Committee at Oxford University in April 2009 that will review baseline data and finalise implementation strategies.

MEND initiative: Denmark

OxHA has been partnering with the MEND initiative (Mind, Exercise, Nutrition, Do It!) in Denmark, which received significant press coverage in the Danish media, following impressive 12-month results from the first pilot groups of children.

The oxha.org MEND pages (in Danish) have been updated: click here >>

Industry

Business4Life

OxHA continues to be involved in this collaboration of food, fitness and media industries, which support the government’s Change4Life (C4L) movement that seeks to encourage healthier lifestyles among UK citizens.

PepsiCo

In January, Derek Yach, OxHA board member and director of global health policy at PepsiCo, spoke to a large audience at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, with Professor Philip James (the Chair of the International Task Force on Obesity) on the topic ‘What role should the corporate sector play in tackling the global obesity pandemic?’ Derek was also interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

News from Denmark

Over the last few months, Stig Pramming and Eva Olhoff of OxHA have contacted businesses in the Danish food and beverage, sporting goods, telecom and pharma industries, exploring the degree of interest in engaging in collaborative health-promoting activities. If there is sufficient interest, a consortium will be put together to facilitate dialogues, activities, knowledge-sharing and media relations, with the partnering companies paying a yearly fee and sharing the costs of activities.

Workplace

Global Corporate Challenge

OxHA has recently met with Tom Sermon, the European director of the Global Corporate Challenge. OxHA staff will be taking part in this employee health initiative, to be held later in the year, generously funded by the GCC itself. We will be featuring our progress on 3FOUR50. For more information, see the Project Spotlight, below.

World Economic Forum

OxHA attended the Global Agenda Council on Chronic Disease and Malnutrition in Dubai, which set the agenda for this month’s Davos meeting.
Christine Hancock joined the Project Board call to plan this year’s Davos meeting of the ‘Working towards Wellness’ initiative, which will be a private workspace ‘Employee Health as a Strategic Imperative’.
John Tracey, for OxHA, attended a WHO Global Tobacco Treatment Consultation Meeting, which agreed on the need for a multi-stakeholder consortium on treatment for tobacco use.

News from Sydney

Presentations

OxHA Asia-Pacific has given several presentations in Australia: at the Australian General Practitioners Network Conference (AGPN) in Darwin on ‘Healthy People; Healthy Places; Healthy Planet: Applying the Sydney Resolution Locally’, and two presentations at the Sustainability and Health Forum held at the University of Sydney (on ‘Health and Sustainability: Protecting Physical, Mental and Social Health’ and on ‘Industry engagement for sustainable solutions’).

Sydney Resolution

OxHA Asia-Pacific and The University of Sydney Institute for Sustainable Solutions (Health Stream) made a joint submission to the National Preventative Task Force to adopt the Sydney Resolution (for more information on the Resolution, click here >> ) and address the common causes and solutions for sustainability and health in its development of a National Preventative Health Strategy.

Industry – Oxford Dialogues

The report on the Oxford Dialogue for Sustainability and Advertising, which was held on Monday 20 October 2008 under the joint auspices of the Australian Association of National Advertisers, OxHA Asia-Pacific, and the University of Sydney Institute for Sustainable Solutions is now available (click here >>).

OxHA events

Barometer International Seminar

OxHA co-sponsored (with Novo Nordisk and IDF) the Changing Diabetes Barometer International Seminar in Oxford, which discussed the Barometer initiative that Novo Nordisk has set up to measure and compare diabetes across countries. Novo Nordisk believes that only by measuring and comparing, and by placing people with diabetes at the heart of diabetes care, can the disease be defeated. Participants included OxHA Board member David Matthews, and CIH representatives from Delhi, Leicester and Israel.

Footage from the Barometer seminar is available here >>

'How food and beverage companies help improve population health: some insights from PepsiCo.’

OxHA hosted this event in London, which was held at the House of St Barnabas and sponsored by PepsiCo UK. Dr Derek Yach spoke about the role that industry can play in helping to improve population health. Stakeholders from the private sector, academia and NGOs were brought together to discuss the pros and cons to private-sector collaboration with governments and multilateral organisations, and to examine effective ways for the food and drink industry to compete along health lines.
Footage of the event can be found on 3FOUR50: click here >>

Global headlines – the OxHA Alliance Alerts

18 Alliance Alerts have published during December 2008 and January 2009. There are also regular video news updates on chronic disease prevention on the 3FOUR50 website – click here >>h).

Highlights of recent Alerts include:

Getting moving in Recife, Brazil >>

Results of a new study evaluating the impact on physical activity of Academia da Cidade (ACP), an ongoing community-based programme designed to promote leisure-time physical activity in Recife, a city in north-eastern Brazil.

Health as an essential human right >>

For the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, OxHA focused on the importance of health in human rights.

If you would like to comment on an Alert, or if you identify a story that could be incorporated on our site as an Alliance Alert, please email us (click here >>).

Project spotlight: Global Corporate Challenge

This summer thousands of companies worldwide will take part in an exciting corporate health initiative known as the Global Corporate Challenge (GCC). The GCC’s aim is to reduce an individual's risk of developing chronic heart disease and type II diabetes by increasing his/her motivation to get moving. It does this in a unique and innovative way: challenging teams of employees to take part in a virtual walk around the world over a period of 125 days – last year, entrants included teams from Nestlé, Transport for London, Zurich Bank and AstraZeneca.

An annual event, the 2009 GCC is scheduled to run from 21 May to 22 September 2009. During these four months, an estimated 90,000 employees will count their daily steps using a GCC pedometer (aiming to surpass 10,000 steps a day). As part of a team of seven, participants enter their daily step counts into the GCC website. The website then aggregates each team's steps, converts the steps to distance, and plots the team's progress along their virtual journey around the world. The more active a team, the further they will progress along the journey and the more communities and countries they will explore (using the power of Google Earth).

The GCC has already shown that small changes really can make a big difference – last year, the average participant lost 5.5kg in weight and 6cm from around their waist. Closing date for applications (£49 per person) is the end of April. The Oxford Health Alliance will be fielding its own team. So – take the stairs, get off the bus a stop earlier, walk to your colleague's desk, challenge your employer and join OxHA in this initiative!

For more information, contact Tom Sermon (email here >>) or visit www.gettheworldmoving.com.

Upcoming dates

OxHA members are encouraged to email us >> with any important upcoming events that they would like highlighted here and on OxHA’s online calendar (click here >>).

February

National Heart Month Canada – Heart & Stroke Foundation of Canada

1–4: Clinical Nutrition Week

2–3: 2009 National Health Policy Conference, Washington DC

3–9: National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, Canada

4: World Cancer Day

4–10: National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, United Kingdom

5-7: Aga Khan University Chronic Diseases Summit: Preparing Communities - Chronic Diseases in the Developing Regions of Asia and Africa, Kampala, Uganda

5–8: 5th Asia Oceania Congress of Obesity, Mumbai, India

6: National Wear Red Day, United States

8–10: American Dietetic Association's Public Policy Workshop, Washington DC

10: Managing Appetite: Pharmaceuticals and Functional Foods, London

12–16: AAAS Annual Meeting, Our Planet and Its Life: Origins and Futures, Chicago

15: Nirvana Day

17–20: 2009 International Stroke Conference

23–25: 20th National Conference on Chronic Disease Prevention and Control: Cultivating Healthy Communities, Washington DC

22–28: National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, United States

23: Maha Shivaratri

23–25: 20th National Conference on Chronic Disease Prevention and Control, 'Cultivating Healthy Communities', National Harbor, MD, USA

25: Ash Wednesday

25–28: International Conference on Advanced Technologies & Treatments for Diabetes (ATTD) Athens, Greece

26: Women's Health Conference, Greenville, NC, United States

March

Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month

National Nutrition Month (United States)

National Nutrition Month (Canada)

3– 5: Innovations for the Built Environment, Earls Court, London

5–8: 40th Annual Meeting on Women’s Cancer, San Antonio, TX

6–7: Tobacco-control workshop for young people (prior to 14th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health), New Delhi, India

6–8: International Women's Day 2009

8–12: 14th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health, 'The Way Forward – Multi-sectoral Action for Tobacco Control: Policies, Pathway, Partners and People', Mumbai, India

10–14: Joint Conference - 49th Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention, and: Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism, Palm Harbor, FL

11: No Smoking Day (United Kingdom)

11: Hola Mohalla

11–14: Primary therapy of Early Breast Cancer 2009: 11th International Conference, St Gallen, Switzerland

16–19: 19th Annual Art & Science of Health Promotion Conference: What Works Best in Health Promotion? San Francisco, CA

24: 21st Annual American Diabetes Alert Day

24–27: 13th Pan Arab Conference on Diabetes, Cairo, Egypt

25–26: 17th UKPHA Annual Public Health Forum, Brighton

25: American Diabetes Alert Day, United States

26: Tackling Obesity '09, London

26–28: 5th International Symposium on Diabetes and Pregnancy DIP 2009, Sorrento, Italy

27–29: 17th Annual Congress on Women’s Health, Williamsburg, VA