A symposium entitled ”Managing Health Inequalities” was held  in Dom Łódzki in Brussels on the  7th of September 2014,  as part of the annual European Week of Regions and Cities.  It was co-organized by the Medical University of Lodz, Regional Office of the Lodz Region in Brussels and the Nofer Institute of Occupational Medicine in Lodz, and its aim was to draw attention to inequality in the access to health care, as well as to establish cooperation within international research projects.

The meeting aroused great interest and gathered more than 100 participants, among them individuals who shape health policy in their regions, managers of research projects, representatives of European non-government organizations, academic and business environment.

The event was opened by the Director of the Health Systems and Products Directorate in DG Health and Consumers – Andrzej Ryś, who presented the Union’s instruments serving for prevention of health inequalities.

Then the lectures were delivered by experts, who referred to the leading theme of the symposium in the context of regional policy: Martín Guillermo Ramirez, Secretary General of the Association of European Border Regions (AEBR); César Santos, General Secretary for Healthcare (SES), Extremadura Region; Lilija Madjar, Director of the Regional Development Agency, Ljubljana Region; Soňa Měrtlová, Chief of Health Policy, Wysoczyna Region ; Nuno Pedro Marques dos Santos Borges, Deputy President of the Committee for Coordination and Development of the Algarve Region; José Robalo, President of Health Administration, Antalejo Region; and Silvana Tilocca, Director of the Department of Health Policy and Prevention, Cagliari Region. The first part of the event ended with a discussion of the symposium participants with the experts.

The second part of the meeting - a broking session, the aim of which was to establish contacts as part of international research projects, focused around 5 thematic areas, i.e.: healthy ageing, information and communication technologies, food safety, health care coordination as well as monitoring and evaluation of research projects.  Each of the subjects was moderated by an expert in a given field. The moderator of the part concerning healthy ageing, which had the greatest number of participants, was prof. Jolanta Walusiak-Skorupa, MD, PhD, who along with the remaining representatives of NIOM (Marta Wiszniewska, PhD;  Maciej Dobras, MA and Piotr Sakowski, MA) started a very fruitful discussion with representatives of numerous countries (including representatives of the People’s Republic of China). The discussion resulted in establishing new contacts, which in future may lead to realization of a joint project. Participants of the broking session, who afterwards referred to it using only superlatives, really got to like its convention.

The event also got a lot of publicity in the Committee of the Regions and in the European Commission.