Webinar: “MHPSS Coordination in Humanitarian Response” (English)

Dr. Michael Copland is the Global Coordinator of the Child Protection Area of Responsibility led by UNICEF. He has over 20 years of professional experience in managing humanitarian field operations and child protection programming including postings as a technical specialist on child release and reintegration programs in Sri Lanka, Uganda and South Sudan. Michael holds degrees in Social Work and International Law from the University of Melbourne, Australia, where he worked as a family counsellor and group program clinician in adolescent mental health services.

Nour Kik is a public health professional and currently the Policy and Advocacy Coordinator at the National Mental Health Programme, Ministry of Public Health in Lebanon. She is leading the coordination of the Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Task Force which aims at ensuring an effective, coordinated and focused inter-agency response to the MHPSS needs of persons living in Lebanon, with a special focus on persons affected by the Syrian crisis. She also coordinates the development process of mental health related strategies and plans and efforts to mainstream mental health policy in other sectors.  She has a special interest in Public Mental Health and more specifically in Public Policy and inter-sectoral coordination for policy coherence.

Dr. Rabih El Chammay is a psychiatrist and currently the head of the National Mental Health Programme at the Ministry of Public Health in Lebanon. After founding the programme, he led the development of the first National Mental Health and Substance Use Strategy 2015-2020 aiming at reforming the Mental Health System in Lebanon towards community-based mental health services inline with Human rights and latest evidence that is currently under implementation. He is a member of the Department of Psychiatry at the faculty of Medicine at Saint Joseph University in Beirut. He has special interest in Public Mental Health and more specifically in Refugee Mental Health and health system strengthening. He has been working on these topics in the MENA region as well as on the international level with various agencies such as WHO, UNHCR, UNICEF, IMC and many other NGOs for the last 10 years.

Dr. Fahmy Hanna has more than a decade of experience in mental health services and its development in low and middle income settings. He previously served at the WHO office in Damascus /Syria as a Technical officer on mental health during the current crisis in the country, and previously worked at the WHO office in Libya from 2011 to 2014 as a mental health advisor providing technical support for designing and implementing a successful scale up program for mental health. He also served at WHO EMRO office as Technical officer on mental health and substance abuse during 2010-2011. In 2014, he moved full-time to WHO in Geneva, where his main areas of work include monitoring of global mental health plans and activities, and technical assistance to countries on mental health service development. He contributed to the development of a number key WHO products including WHO Mental Health Atlas 2014 and mhGAP Intervention Guide Version 2.0. Since July 2017, Dr Hanna is representing WHO as the co-chair of the Inter Agency Standing Committee for Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergencies.

About the Moderator:

Marcio Gagliato is a clinical psychologist, with a Masters degree in social psychology, and is currently undertaking doctoral research on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Humanitarian Settings from the Global Public Health perspective. Since 2015, he has been a part of the MHPSS.net team, with lead responsibility for supporting ongoing humanitarian emergencies. From 2008-2009 he was awarded a Human Rights fellowship from Columbia University (New York). Over the past decade, he has worked with several organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross (Gaza 2014-2015, Iran 2016), International Organization for Migration (Libya 2012-2014), the Center for the Victims of Torture (Zimbabwe 2010-2011), Save the Children (Brazil 2009-2010) and CARE international (USA-HQ and East Central Africa Region 2008-2009). He regularly undertakes work focusing on a wide range of MHPSS management programmatic areas, especially in emergencies and protracted crises.