Bridging Science, Policy and Society CAPHRI’s Global Impact through WHO Collaborating Centres

The first hub, the WHO Collaborating Centre Regions for Health and Cross-Border Public Health, is embedded within the Living Lab Public Health Mosa and led by the Department of Social Medicine. Under the leadership of Prof. Dr Christian Hoebe and Youth Health Physician Dr Rianne Reijs, this centre addresses a pressing European reality: approximately 30% of the European Union consists of border regions. These areas are home to roughly 125 million people who regularly cross borders for healthcare, employment, education, and daily life.

While these regions face complex challenges due to differing laws, healthcare systems, and socioeconomic conditions, they also offer exceptional opportunities for collaboration. Focusing on three vital themes—infectious disease control, youth mental health, and environmental health—the centre aims to bring substantial value to Maastricht University, CAPHRI, and, most importantly, the citizens living across European borders, particularly in the Euregion Meuse-Rhine. As Prof. Dr Christian Hoebe notes, this international recognition serves as an essential engine to turn evidence into cross-border action.

Simultaneously, the Department of International Health at CAPHRI has been designated as the WHO Collaborating Centre on Public Health Leadership and Workforce Development. Linked to the professorial chair held by Professor Katarzyna Czabanowska (Kasia), who leads the centre alongside Professor Milena Pavlova, this hub concentrates on strengthening public health leadership capacity, often in the face of ongoing emergencies and crises. According to Professor Czabanowska, the driving philosophy is clear: health systems can only address current and future challenges effectively if we invest in, recognise, and build the capacity of the people who make up the public health workforce.

This centre builds upon a longstanding history of collaboration with the WHO, including vital projects and missions in countries such as Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Greece, Moldova, Georgia, and Tashkent. A core focus of their current work is addressing regional disparities in how public health is perceived. In some countries, public health is not yet considered a distinct scientific discipline, often being subsumed under nursing or medical sciences. For instance, colleagues in the Czech Republic currently lack a dedicated Public Health Bachelor or Master programme.

To facilitate progress across Europe, the centre has developed a practical model outlining actionable steps for nations to professionalise their workforce, guiding them through competency development, training, and formal frameworks like credentialing, accreditation, and professional codes of conduct.

The centre’s impact is already visible across several successful regional initiatives:

• Environmental Health Competency Report: Working closely with the WHO EURO Bonn office, the team developed environmental health competency profiles. This collaboration has resulted in a comprehensive report that, after being reviewed by the WHO, will soon be published and presented to the governments of all 52 countries in the WHO European Region.

• Capacity Building & Training: The centre actively drives capacity building by implementing WHO European Public Health Leadership courses, alongside a specialised 'Leadership in One Health' programme developed with the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and the WHO EURO Country Office in Kyiv.

• Published Research: The team has successfully published cutting-edge research on workforce enumeration, digital public health, and the crucial intersection between primary care and public health.

Ultimately, these two designations signal a broader, deeper shift: the link between policy-making stakeholders like the WHO and scientific institutes like CAPHRI has never been closer. Since the profound global stress test of COVID-19, the world increasingly requires a proper scientific grounding for policy, making it clear that impactful policies must be co-created.

For CAPHRI, this close connection to science inherently means coming closer to society. Public health professionals act as the vital 'linking pins' who must bridge the gap between scientific institutes, ministries, medical professionals, and the general public—a crucial task in an era of misinformation and fake news.

This designation as WHO Collaborating Centres serves as a valuable recognition, but more importantly, it reminds us of why we do this work: to ensure that knowledge is generated to serve a shared, global philosophy: we can't leave anybody behind, and we never will.