On Monday, May 24, 2021, addressing the WHO Assembly, President Emmanuel Macron announced that the World Health Academy would open in Lyon (Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France) in 2023. The Academy is intended to “become the benchmark institution for training in public health”.
Training in global health issues
First announced in June 2019, the Academy aims to “train public officials, business leaders and the driving forces of global civil society in world health issues”. France will invest more than €120m in the project.
Partly financed by local authorities, the World Health Academy will open in Lyon in 2023 at the Gerland biotechnology research cluster, which is home to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and a hub for pharmaceutical companies.
The new WHO facility will help meet the pressing need to train health workers.
A range of courses starting this summer
In the summer of 2021, a first online course catalog will be released.
To host the first training courses, the WHO Academy simulation center, located at the Departmental and Metropolitan Fire and Rescue Service (SDMIS) in Lyon is nearing completion.
Collaborations have already been organized, such as in March 2021 when two photographers from the iCAP department of Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University took part in a photoshoot of simulated victims in a reconstruction of a 30-bed hospital emergency department.
The series of photographs will be integrated into the database of more than a thousand patients used in the WHO Academy’s training courses. One of its first hybrid courses will focus on the organization of emergency service professionals and their actions in the first 30 minutes after the occurrence of an event involving dozens of victims.
Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 (French: Université Claude-Bernard Lyon 1, UCBL) is one of the three public universities of Lyon, France. It is named after the French physiologist Claude Bernard and specialises in science and technology, medicine, and sports science. It was established in 1971 by the merger of the ‘faculté des sciences de Lyon’ with the ‘faculté de médecine’.
The main administrative, teaching and research facilities are located in Villeurbanne, with other campuses located in Gerland, Rockefeller, and Laennec in the 8th arrondissement of Lyon. Attached to the university are the Hospices Civils de Lyon, including the ‘Centre Hospitalier Lyon-Sud’, which is the largest teaching hospital in the Rhône-Alpes region and the second-largest in France.
The university has been independent since January 2009. In 2020 it managed an annual budget of over €420 million and had 2857 faculty.
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