European Public Health News * President's column * EUPHA office column * Message from the Regional Director * Patient safety and health care-associated infections * 6th European Public Health Conference, 13-16 November 2013, Brussels, Belgium

Abstract

This first European Public Health News of 2013 is closely related to the theme of the 2013 European Public Health Conference: ‘Health in Europe: are we there yet? Learning from the past, building the future’. Chaze and Adam show that more needs to be done in patient safety; Jakab shows how WHO Europe helps build the future with the Health 2020 initiative; Zeegers Paget explains that building the future of EUPHA is based on the successes from the past; and Ricciardi reflects on the importance of European Public Health Conferences by summarizing the Malta 2012 conference. Ms Jakab describes the new year of European public health wonderfully in her column: ‘I believe that Health 2020 can add significant value to all our work and serve as unique resource to renew, enhance and enrich our efforts to work together for the benefit of the people of our Region, even in these difficult economic times’. # President’s column {#article-title-2} Taking advantage of the notes of our dear colleague and friend Natasha Muscat Azzopardi, Chief Medical Officer of Malta, I would like to underline the importance and success of the 5th European Public Health Conference. This conference was an important landmark, and it marked the 20th anniversary of EUPHA, a small project starting out from a noble idea of public health researchers who believed they had to go beyond the mere confines of the traditional researcher role and do something for public health at a European level. It was also the 5th anniversary of the European Public Health Conference, which has brought together the leading organizations in public health in Europe and has taken this conference altogether to a different scope and dimension. The conference got off to a fantastic start with Louise Gunning-Schepers putting forward the challenge that we do reasonably well on knowledge generation but …