Keynote Speakers
Joseph R. Betancourt, MD, MPH
Director, The Disparities Solutions Center
Senior Scientist, Mongan Institute for Health Policy
Director of Multicultural Education, Mass General Hospital
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Betancourt directs the Disparities Solutions Center, which works with healthcare organizations to improve quality of care, address racial and ethnic disparities, and achieve equity. He is Director of Multicultural Education for Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and an expert in cross-cultural care and communication. Dr. Betancourt served on several Institute of Medicine committees, including those that produced Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Health Care and Guidance for a National Health Care Disparities Report. He has also advised federal, state and local government, foundations, health plans, hospitals, health centers, professional societies, trade organizations, pharma, and private industry on strategies to improve quality of care and eliminate disparities. He has received grants from foundations and the federal government, and published extensively in these areas. He is a practicing internist, co-chairs the MGH Committee on Racial and Ethnic Disparities, and sits on the Boston Board of Health as well as Health Equity Committee, and the Massachusetts Disparities Council.
Professor David Ingleby
David Ingleby is Professor of Intercultural Psychology at Utrecht University, The Netherlands, where he works at ERCOMER (European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations). His main fields of research are health and social care in multicultural societies, forced migration and health, and child development in different social and cultural contexts. He is involved in several European collaborative projects on migrant health. In 2007 he was Willy Brandt Memorial Professor at the School of International Migration and Ethnic Relations, Malmö University. At present he is Consultant to the Council of Europe's Expert Committee on Mobility, Migration and Access to Health Care, and advisor to the WHO Regional Office for Europe on migration- and ethnicity-linked health inequities.
Professor IRENA PAPADOPOULOS, PhD, MA(Ed), BA, DipNEd, DipN, NDNCert, RN, RM.
Professor of Transcultural Health and Nursing and Head of Research Centre for Transcultural Studies in Health, Middlesex University, London.
Irena (known to all as Rena) trained as a nurse and worked primarily in the community where she was privileged to meet patients and their families in their own 'world'. Her community nursing experiences in the early 1980's as well as her own life experiences influenced her view that nursing and healthcare services were not meeting the needs of their multicultural users. She became a teacher for nurses wishing to influence the way nursing students were prepared for their future roles. She has been researching transcultural health issues for the last 20 years. She has authored two books on transcultural health and one in health promotion (in Greek), numerous book chapters, articles and research reports and has lectured and delivered keynote conference presentations in a number of countries. She is currently co-authoring a new book on transcultural nursing/health (in Greek). She is a scholar of the international Transcultural Nursing Society and a founding member of ETNA (European Transcultural Nursing Association). She has been a professor of Transcultural Health and Nursing since 2002 and the founder and Head of the Research Centre for Transcultural Studies in Health at Middlesex University since 1995.
Philip Watt
Philip Watt has been CEO of the Cystic Fibrosis Association of Ireland since May 2009. This is the national advocacy body for Cystic Fibrosis (CF) in Ireland which works closely with parents, people with CF, hospitals and the HSE to improve services to our members. Ireland has the highest rate of CF in the world, three times the incidence of the EU and the United States (www.cfireland.ie).
Between 1998 to 2008 Philip Watt was the CEO of National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI), an expert body providing advice to the Government and the European Union on racism and integration in Ireland. During this period he was seconded to the Department of Justice Equality and Law Reform to draft the Irish Government’s National Action Plan Against Racism (NPAR) 2005-2008. This report continues to inform integration policy in Ireland and lead to the development of integration polices on health (2008), education (2010) and policing (2007) being adopted by Government Departments and agencies. He was awarded a Media and Multicultural Awards for his work in NCCRI in 2008 (www.nccri.ie).
He has served on the Boards of Pobail, the Women’s Health Council, Trinity College Dublin and the Northern Ireland Council for the Homeless. Philip is graduate of Trinity College Dublin and a post-graduate of the University of Ulster and is the author and editor of a range of publications including for example:
- Racism in Ireland, (2001). Veritas Press.
- Government of Ireland, (2005). The National Action Plan against Racism 2005-2008. Author
- NCCRI, (2008) Building Integrated Neighborhoods Part 2 - Update and Recommendations
- NCCRI, (2006) Improving Government Service Delivery to Minority Ethnic Groups: Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Scotland. Commissioned by the Office of the First and Deputy First Ministers in Northern Ireland.
