Rethinking the future of health systems, by Professor Kenji Shibuya.

This presentation will review the challenges and opportunities in population health approaches and address its implications to the future of health systems.

About the seminar:

In 2015, Kenji chaired and led the advisory panel that presented a vision for Japanese healthcare in 2035. The panel’s report, ‘Health Care 2035’, describes a health care system designed for people of all lifestyles. In other words, the current health system must be rebuilt as a new sort of ‘social system’. The visions and approaches proposed in Health Care 2035 are consistent with those addressed in the 2016 landmark report by the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, ‘Improving the Health of the Public by 2040’. This report proposed a paradigm shift in research, medical practices, and public health: the revolutionary, so-called ‘health of the public’ approach, which involves disciplines that are not usually considered components of the public health field. As the interactions between science, society, and policy change day-by-day, four public health ‘tsunamis’ with global reach have become worthy of concern: population aging, chronic diseases, health technologies, and globalization. Such issues should be tackled by the innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to research and practices in population health.

About the presenter:

Professor Kenji Shibuya is Director of the University Institute for Population Health at King’s College London. His expertise ranges across important topics in global health policy monitoring and evaluation; health system performance; health financing with an emphasis on universal health coverage; and product and system innovations, public-private partnerships, and R&D strategies. His global policy vision, with an emphasis on local ownership, performance, partnership and innovation has become the core of the new global health strategy of the Japanese government. He has been an advisor to both central and local governments, and most recently he was appointed as Special Advisor to the Director-General of the World Health Organization. He spearheaded the future strategic directions of the Japanese global health policy agenda after the Hokkaido Toyako G8 Summit in 2008. He led the Lancet Series on Japan, published in 2011 in an effort to jump-start debates on Japanese domestic and global health policy reform. In 2015, he chaired the landmark Advisory Panel on Health Care 2035 for the Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare. He obtained his MD at the University of Tokyo in 1991 and earned a doctorate of public health in international health economics at Harvard University in 1999.

This seminar is part of the series of events celebrating the 10 years of the Centre for Global Mental Health, in collaboration with King's Global Health Institute.