This year the annual European Public Health (EPH) Conference was held in Berlin, Germany from the 9-12 November. The theme of the conference was, ‘Strengthening health systems: improving population health and being prepared for the unexpected’.

During the conference the SUNI-SEA project team hosted a skill building session ‘Scaling-up community based NCDs prevention and control interventions: focus on quality’. The session was led by Dominika Plančíková, and Jaap Koot, Jeanet Landsman and Hanneke Vervoort who gave introductions about community health system strengthening. Other team members Vitri Widyaningsih (Indonesia), Nong Thi Thu Trang (Vietnam), and Khin Hnin Swe (Myanmar) could not joined in person but helped in preparing the session.

Unlike clinical medicine, there has been insufficient attention given to quality assurance in most public health programmes. The session therefore raised this issue as the main point of the discussion. The team and participants shared different ways to improve the quality of services at community health care settings and discussed what more can be done to ensure the quality of services, and address challenges that communities face. One of the conclusions of the discussion was that to strengthen bottom-up services, capacity building is essential, and training courses must be adapted to the community context and culture.

The session led to a fruitful discussion and was a great opportunity for us to share some of our learning from the SUNI-SEA project.

More information on the conference: https://ephconference.eu/