Arpana Verma

Overview

Dr Arpana Verma is Head of the Division of Population Health, Health Services Research and Primary Care. She is Director of Manchester Urban Collaboration on Health (MUCH) a WHO Collaborating Centre and honorary Consultant in Public Health at PHE. MUCH is based within the School of Health Sciences in the Faculty of Biology, Medical and Human Sciences. MUCH performs high quality research, teaching and training, in the field of public health and has established links to local, national and international public health organisations (www.manchester.ac.uk/much). MUCH was recently designated the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Health Indicators.

Dr Verma is currently the Programme Director for the Masters in Public Health and MRes in Public Health/Prim online distance learning course, which offers an innovative approach to learning, meeting the training needs for health professionals interested in a career in public health or those seeking new skills in this area (http://www.mhs.manchester.ac.uk/postgraduate/programmes/taughtmasters/ph/mph). She is also the Evaluation Lead for Well North, a collaborative programme which is developing, testing and piloting a set of linked interventions to improve the health of the poorest, fastest, in some of the most deprived areas of the North of England (http://www.mahsc.ac.uk/for-patients-and-the-public/well-north/). She is the teaching lead for the MAHSC Global Health theme and a board member of cities@manchester (http://www.cities.manchester.ac.uk/)

Dr Verma was the principle investigator (PI) of the European Urban Health Indicator System project (EURO-URHIS 2) funded by DG Research under the FP7 programme (http://www.urhis.eu/), and is also the president of the European Public Health Association section on Urban Health (http://www.eupha.org/urban-public-health).

Dr Verma is also PI on a number of health service research projects, primarily in hepatitis C and blood borne virus prevention, infection control, immunisation including MMR and HPV vaccine. Many of these projects involve data linkage of health indicators, risk factors and the wider determinants of health to help understand the urban challenges to health both within the UK and globally. The most recent EU grant consists of investigating health ageing in cities.

Dr Verma is also an expert for WHO, which has led to several publications (http://www.who.int/kobe_centre/publications/urban_metrics2011/en/index.html  http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/172509/Developing-indicators-for-the-Health-2020-targets-Eng.pdf )

Dr Verma is also part of the Community Based Medical Education team at the Manchester Medical School, and her previous role was Director for Undergraduate Studies for the Institute of Population Health. Dr Verma also runs training events for public health professionals including the Public Health Grand Rounds, Festival of Public Health and with MAHSC, the 11th International Conference on Urban Health 2014 (http://www.festivalofpublichealth.co.uk/ http://www.icuh2014.com/).

Dr Verma also holds an honorary consultant post at Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust and Public Health England.

Biography

I qualified as a doctor from the University of Manchester in 1995. Prior to this I worked at the Manchester Adult Cystic Fibrosis Centre, South Manchester University NHS Trust and in Respiratory Medicine. 

I thoroughly enjoy teaching and currently teach undergraduates and postgraduates from a variety of backgrounds. My research interestes include urban health, hepatitis C and blood borne viruses. I set up the Manchester Urban Collaboration on Health which is part of the Centre for Epidemiology. More information regarding all our projects can be found on the intranet.