User:Lewis kaplan/sandbox

Lewis H Kaplan is an Australian public health lobbyist who has been CEO of a number of significant non-government organisations at state and national level, including Diabetes Australia and Alzheimer's Australia NSW. His early career in public health started with a year volunteering with the WHO Global Smallpox Eradication Program in remote central Ethiopia in 1973-74 followed by a stint as a technical advisor in Bangladesh in 1975, at the height of the final pandemic before total eradication in Bangladesh was achieved the following year. This work eventually led him to undertake a Masters in Health Science in International Health at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health for which he won a Fulbright Scholarship. The second year of this degree course was an internship which Kaplan fulfilled by setting up an Expanded Program on Immunisation in newly independent Vanuatu, working with Save the Children Fund. He soon widened its scope to become a mother and child health program which subsequently won support from Save the Children Fund Australia and became the largest funded program in Vanuatu under the Australian government's bi-lateral-NGO development aid program. Kaplan moved to Australia in 1985 to further develop overseas development aid programs for Save the Children Fund Australia, setting up projects in the Solomon Islands, Bangladesh and Cambodia in addition to a larger and on-going program in Vanuatu. In the late 1980s Kaplan spent 2 years as national co-ordinator of the Healthy Cities Australia pilot project as an introduction to the Australian domestic community health and health promotion scene, including contributing a chapter to the book Healthy Cities (J. Ashton ed.). Kaplan spent most of the 1990s working as Executive Director of Council on the Ageing NSW where he helped build a strong national federation, developed a number of innovative programs to enhance the well-being and independence of older people and generally educate the media, government and industry about the social and economic value of the ageing population. In response to the Howard Government's proposal to re-write the aged care act in 1996, Kaplan initiated the NSW Aged Care Alliance, a gathering of consumer, provider and professional peak bodies. The success of this Alliance led to its replication nationally, with the National Aged Care Alliance established in 2000. As CEO of Alzheimer's Australia NSW, Kaplan was part of the leadership team which developed the policy position and intellectual capital for dementia to become an Australian national health priority. He chaired the Alzheimer's national conference in 2005 at which the then Federal Minister for Ageing made the national health priority announcement. In 2011 he wrote the national diabetes election agenda document, published in 2012 and promoted by Diabetes Australia to all federal parliamentarians. The agenda received wide media coverage and support. In 2013 Kaplan, as CEO of Diabetes Australia, led a nation-wide call for the Australian Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition to convene a bi-partisan summit to address the chronic disease pandemic in Australia as a response to the UN High Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases held in late 2011.