wp7

Integration

This work package is led by Wasim Maziak with assistance from Fouad Fouad, in the Syrian Center for Tobacco Studies, Aleppo, Syria.

The main two objectives of WP7 are:

- To promote intellectual coordination of the work by developing a theoretical underpinning for the research methodology, exploring cross-cutting themes and common issues.
- To consider issues around generalis ability of results from the four study countries.

Four issues of newsletters in English and Arabic were produced and disseminated, and used to highlight and communicate MedCHAMPS' main objectives and work package progress amongst the project partners and to the outside world. The newsletters were distributed to local, regional and international professional list servers and were used during scientific conferences and meetings to introduce the scientific and public health community as well as policy makers and other stakeholders to the MedCHAMPS project and the importance of data and analysis conducted within the project for national and regional policy to curb cardiovascular disease and their risk factors.

To facilitate further information integration between different parts of the project and the publication of scientific reports from the project, WP7 led efforts to publish the rational aims and methods in a baseline paper that will provide a single reference about the project's aims and methods, and can be used and cited by individual researchers as they prepare their specific research papers from the project. This paper is expected to be be published soon in the International Journal of Public Health.

The WP researchers have been working with project partners to coordinate comparative papers summarising the MedCHAMPS experience, either thematically, cross-disciplinarily or in relation to the experience of conducting such massive research and training programmes in an unstable and developing region. These comparative papers will serve as a medium for the understanding of similarities and differences in cardiovascular health among partner countries and their underlying factors, which will help greatly in extrapolating MedCHAMPS lessons to other countries in the Mediterranean region.

We have also led the efforts to plan and publish a Supplement to the International Journal of Public Health that will contain main country-level research papers coming out of MedCHAMPS. The plan is that this Supplement will contain 12-14 research papers in addition to editorials summarising main messages from the papers, and synthesising their results within the larger framework of responding to the escalating epidemic of cardiovascular disease and their risk factors in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Professor Maziak and Professor Critchley will serve as Guest Editors of this supplement.