World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Neurosciences

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has renewed the IoN Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy

ion.ucl.ac.uk/departments/epilepsy" target="_self">(UCL Institute of Neurology) designation as a WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Neurosciences.

The remit of the centre is to help the WHO in their aim of bringing epilepsy out of the shadows. 

This will allow the Centre to continue with vital work such as the training of health personnel from low income countries, assessing models of epilepsy care in resource-poor settings and to help implement the epilepsy component of the MHGap programme recently launched by the WHO.  The Centre has been very active in the last four years with operations in countries as diverse as Brazil, China, Kenya, Cameroon, Bulgaria and Georgia.

In work led by Professor Ley Sander, the Centre has, for instance, helped pilot models of health care delivery in Rural China and in Brazil and is currently carrying out similar work in Cameroon and in Georgia. It is also currently involved in assessing the role of past infections in the risk of people developing epilepsy in Kenya and is ascertaining the risks for epilepsy amongst the Roma community in Bulgaria. The WHO Collaborative Centre is the only one in Neurosciences in the UK and is one of only two such centres at UCL.

The WHO collaborating centres are institutions such as research institutes, parts of universities or academies, which are designated by the Director-General to carry out activities in support of the Organization's programmes.

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