Prof. em. Jürgen M. Pelikan, Ph.D.
juergen.pelikan@goeg.at
Prof. em. Jürgen M. Pelikan, Ph.D., is the founder (1992) and (co-)director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Health Promotion in Hospitals and Health Care, now at Department Health and Society at Gesundheit Österreich GmbH (Austrian Public Health Institute). As principal investigator (PI) of the WHO model project Health and Hospital and the first European Pilot Hospital Project he has co-initiated the International Network of Health Promoting Hospitals and Health Services. Since its start in 1993, he is Chair of the Scientific Committee of the annual International HPH Conferences and advisor to the HPH Governance Board. Prof. Pelikan has an outstanding expertise in HPH-related projects including directing two EU-projects Health Promotion in Primary Health Care - General Practice and Community Pharmacy, and Migrant Friendly Hospitals. Concerning HPH, he co-authored the Budapest Declaration, the Vienna Recommendations, the 18 HPH core strategies, the Amsterdam Declaration Towards Migrant-Friendly Hospitals in an ethno-culturally diverse Europe and the New Haven Recommendations on partnering with patients, families and citizens to enhance performance and quality in health promoting hospitals and health services.
He was influential in establishing health literacy research in Europe. He has co-initiated the first European Health Literacy Survey, were he was responsible for the work package of data analysis and results reporting, he was the PI of a project on Health Literate Health Care Organizations and lead a work package in the European Diabetes Literacy Project. He was the project director of an Austrian project on adolescent´s health literacy and on health literacy of two migrant groups in Austria. He was a co-editor and author of WHO´s The solid facts – Health Literacy. Actually he is co-chairing WHO´s Action network on Measuring Population and Organizational Health Literacy (M-POHL) and is the PI of the international European health literacy survey HLS19, the first project of M-POHL. He is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Asian Health Literacy Association (AHLA) and a member of the governance board of the International Health Literacy Association (IHLA).
Prof. Pelikan, a sociologist, has authored numerous publications on the theory of health and health promotion, on salutogenesis, the settings approach, evaluation in health promotion, quality in health care, measurement of personal health literacy and of health literate health care organizations. He was a former President of the European Society of the Sociology of Health and Medicine and an elected member of the board of trustees of the International Union of Health Promotion and Education, a consultant to WHO/Euro, WHO-HQ and the European Commission. He was a member of the editorial board of the journal Health Promotion International and is a co-editor of Clinical Health Promotion – Research and Best Practice for Patients, Staff and Community.