The Institute of Philippine Culture (IPC), through its eHealth TABLET for Informed Decision Making of Local Government Units (eHATID) Team, hosted a lecture entitled “Framing Health and Climate Change Interactions: Implications to Life Events, Health Information Systems, and Hazard Assessment Tools.” The talk was given by Dr. Miguel Antonio Salazar, M.D., MScIH, who has worked with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) European Centre for Health and Environment. He has also had research experience in health information management in the local and national government.

In the lecture, Dr. Miguel Salazar explained how health information systems in the Philippines could be located in the broader framework of climate change and health. Specifically, he mentioned how these systems could be connected to the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Agreement in Paris. He also discussed how climate change can impact health, and how health systems, such as eHATID, could be used to address the effects brought about by climate change-related events. 

Attendees coming from the local and national government, health sector, academe, and research institutes participated in an open forum after Dr. Salazar’s lecture.

This talk is part of a lecture series hosted by the eHATID Team, which will cover topics such as climate change, health, disaster risk reduction, gender, and technology, among others.

eHATID is an IPC project funded by the Philippine Center for Health Research and Development – Department of Science and Technology. The project aims to equip local government executives of data on notifiable diseases and other pertinent information on patients’ health in their locality for better and informed decision-making. The eHATID Team has conducted training seminars for 236 municipalities, and plans to train around 250 more cities and municipalities by the end of 2016.