Rula Ghandour, Maysaa Nemer, and Reem Ladadwa from the Institute of Community and Public Health attended the 4th MENA Region Adolescents’ Health Conference held in Hurghada, Egypt from the 1st to the 3rd of December 2021 under the theme “Adolescents’ Care-Leaving No One Behind”. The Arab Coalition for Adolescent Health and Medicine (ACAHM) organized the conference under the patronage of the League of Arab States.
The conference focused on the unmet needs of the large and increasing cluster of disadvantaged adolescents in the Middle East and North Africa Region (MENA) suffering from chronic illness or disabilities especially from ethnic minorities or those living in a low socioeconomic environment or displaced due to political violence.
Rula Ghandour presented part of her PhD study on menstrual preparation among adolescents under the title “Menstrual preparation among adolescent girls living in Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Jordan.”
Reem Ladadwa focused on the mental health status, needs, and determinants of female adolescents in refugee camps as her presentation was entitled “Female Adolescents Mental Wellbeing in Palestinian Refugee Camps in Jordan and the West Bank: A Qualitative Study.” In her presentation she addressed the needs and of females adolescents and explored the several determinants of mental wellbeing interacting at social, cultural, political and economic levels inside the camp environment.
Maysaa Nemer presented the findings of a scoping review, which was conducted as a part of a large implementation research project that focuses on adolescents’ reproductive health-health information system in Palestine. The title of her presentation was “Ethical challenges for adolescent health information systems in low resource and humanitarian settings: A scoping review”. In her presentation, she highlighted the gap of knowledge on the ethics of long-term health infrastructures in fragile and resource-constrained settings and the need to address the ethical issues surrounding the implementation of health information systems for adolescents as vulnerable groups in low resource and humanitarian settings.