The opening session took place in Ramallah with the participation of Her Excellency the Palestinian Minister of Health Dr. Mai Al Kaila, representatives of ministries, and a large number of researchers from different countries including Nepal, Sri Lanka and Britain.

The workshop included a discussion about how to improve healthcare responses to gender-based violence in Palestine. The participants also discussed a number of research papers done as part of the HERA project.

Notes:

HERA is a cooperative project between An-Najah National University, University of São Paulo in Brazil, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and University of Bristol.

The project aims to understand how healthcare systems in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC) can integrate and evaluate interventions for violence against Women (VAW) that link with community organizations, and ultimately ensure better outcomes for women and children, engage a range of key stakeholders in intervention development and evaluation with a view to influencing policies and programs on VAW, and develop a global multi-disciplinary network of researchers and service providers who are committed to implementing and testing interventions for violence against women in health care settings to build research capacity and exchange knowledge.

The project is funded by two research grants. The Medical Research Council (MRC) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Foundation Award 2017 to 2019 & the NIHR Global Health Research Group Award 2018 to 2021.