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El Adawy said, “We have experts in this evaluation to make sure that they have achieved at least 80 percent of the indicators. They scored much higher than this,” she said.
The accreditation is for three years because they want to make sure that it was sustainable and it was not a one-time event. However, she said, adding that there are negotiations to make it five years.
The other countries which have been awarded the Healthy City recognition include Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain (Manama was the first to be named), Oman and others.
According to her, the assessment to declare a place as a Healthy City depends on the potential on the ground.
“When the programme begins, it depends on the coordination between the sectors. It can take one, two or three years,” she said.
For instance, in Qatar, they started in 2018 and despite the two years under COVID-19, they have managed to achieve it by now.
According to her, Qatar Foundation’s Education City is the second education institution in the region to be named as ‘Healthy Education City’ after a university in Saudi Arabia.
The Healthy City programme in Qatar serves one of the strategic projects under the ‘Health in All Policies’ priority within the National Health Strategy (NHS) 2018-2022.
It is an inter-sectoral collaborative approach to improve the health and equity for all populations by incorporating health considerations and implications into all decision-making processes and policies across government.
The programme focuses on four areas of work namely, establishment of robust governance structure, community engagement and empowerment, behavioural change interventions, and strengthening monitoring and evaluation.
For her part, Director of Healthy City Network in Qatar Dr Sadriya Al Kohji said, “Already we have a healthy city network which was launched at the beginning of 2020 where we have collaborations with all sectors which are contributing to health from different ministries, NGOs and some private sectors. We did self-assessment for our projects on getting the accreditation and we sat with the health city network for our future plans in order to sustain a healthy environment and being accredited.”
According to her, all the ministries are offering services that are contributing to health, for instance the Ministry of Interior provides security, the Ministry of Municipality do healthy urban planning, the Ministry of Environment monitors the air quality, the Ministry of Education and Higher Education contributes through educational curriculum, the Ministry of Finance provides the budget for the projects, the Ministry of Development and others contribute in different ways.
“We cannot achieve this through the hospitals only. We share our plans with other sectors as well as the community.”
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14/02/2022
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