Double win for Tanaka Academic Dr Rifat Atun

Dr Rifat Atun, Director of Tanaka Business School’s Centre for Health Management has secured a $600,000 grant and been elected a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

The grant will be used to develop and implement of a Public Health Leadership Programme in 2005 and 2006 which will enable future leaders from Europe and Central Asia to:

• manage more strategically within their organisations and health systems
• extend their public health and management knowledge and skills 
• develop core and transferable public health and management competencies 
• experience the latest teaching and learning methods
• reflect critically on personal experience and professional practice

The grant was received jointly with Dr Richard Coker of the European Centre on Health of Societies in Transition (ECOHOST)   of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). The programme will be jointly designed, developed and implemented by Tanaka Business School and LSHTM. The first course will take place at the Tanaka Business School at Imperial College between 27 June and 22 July 2005.

In addition, Dr Atun was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners in recognition of his contribution to the development of General Practice and Primary Care internationally. It is a welcome endorsement of Dr Atun's research in international health systems, his evaluation of health reforms across three continents and his work on the impact of government policy and regulation on the biopharma and health technology sectors. He will be invested at the Annual Meeting of the Royal College in November.

It is the ability of Tanaka's Centre for Health Management to provide a multidisciplinary and multi-method investigative team which differentiates it from other units operating in this field. Established in 2002, the CHM works closely with research groups within Imperial College (particularly the Faculty of Medicine) and outside the College (London School of Hygiene, Kings College, Heidelberg) as well as bilateral (UK DFID, USAID) and multilateral organisations (World Bank and WHO).

Dr Atun is the Director of the MSc in International Health Management programme at Tanaka Business School and teaches Health Systems, Policy and Financing as well as Evidence-based Decision Making and Biopharma Modules.