Skip to main content

The Belgian Association of Public Health (BAPH) A closer acquaintance

Introduction

Public health is a very broad domain. Yet, it can encroach deeply in individual lives. The recent and more chronic examples are manifold: swine flu outbreak, obesity, illicit drug use, BSE, dioxin crisis, and so on. However, Belgian scientific research on public health does not seem to be in the right proportion to the importance of the subject. Since many years, the Belgian Association of Public Health (BAPH) tries to bring together Belgian public health research and researchers. The BAPH is a scientific organisation of research groups and institutions, health workers and policy makers who are active in the field of public health. The aims of the association are to increase the knowledge in different domains of public health, to stimulate public health research and to improve public health practices by bringing together researchers and field workers. To achieve these aims, the association organises thematic scientific meetings, often in collaboration with a university. Every two years the association organises a national symposium. For spreading research results and information, the BAPH can count on the Archives of Public Health, which is the official Journal of the BAPH.

About us

The BAPH is a non-profit making association.

The Governing Board of the BAPH is elected for a period of 3 years.

Table 1 Currently, the members of the Board are:

Board meetings are held on a regular basis. The topics tackled are the organisation of the biennial national symposia on public health and the biennial workshops; new initiatives to be taken (for instance a newsletter for the members); the website of the BAPH (http://www.baph.be); the strategy to attract new members; the relationship with the Archives of Public Health; the relationship with the European Public Health Association (EUPHA), among others.

On December 11, 2009, the 10th biennial national symposium will take place in Mons. The topic is: 'Networks at the crossing of public health practice and research'. People who are interested can find on our website how to participate or submit an abstract.

Membership

The General Assembly to which all members are invited is organised yearly. In 2008, there were 114 members, of whom 79 were already member in 2007. This means that there were 35 new members in 2008. Most members are recruited within the Scientific Institute of Public Health (n = 56) and academic institutions (n = 34). The other members come from administrations, are member as a private person or are from abroad. It is our hope that many more people working as a researcher, health worker or policy maker in the Belgian field of public health, become member of the BAPH.

The BAPH is a financially healthy organisation. Most of the income is generated by membership fees, even if a BAPH membership only costs 50 EUR per year and entitles members to a membership of the European Public Health Association (EUPHA) that groups all national public health associations in Europe; participation in all activities that are organized by EUPHA (http://www.eupha.org); an electronic subscription to the European Journal of Public Health; important reductions to all activities that are organised by the BAPH and EUPHA, such as the biennial National Symposium, and the yearly EUPHA conference. Finally, members of the BAPH are informed when a new issue of the Archives of Public Health is available. This journal is available through the website http://www.iph.fgov.be/aph/.

How to become a member of the BAPH?

For any information or for becoming a member please contact the secretariat of the BAPH

Jamila Buziarsist

Rue Juliette Wytsman, 14

1050 Brussels

Belgium

Phone: +32 2 642 57 09

Fax: + 32 2 642 54 10

E-mail: jamila.buziarsist@iph.fgov.be

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to G Van Hal.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Van Hal, G., Tellier, V., Aelvoet, W. et al. The Belgian Association of Public Health (BAPH) A closer acquaintance. Arch Public Health 67, 49 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1186/0778-7367-67-2-49

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/0778-7367-67-2-49