IPPNW-Students AustriaReports & PhotosSmall report from Austria 2007/08 The student group in Vienna has been growing rapidly over the last year and new groups in other cities will be established in the time to come. Our activities range from intensive work with paperless people, who normally have no access to our health care system, to participation in international projects, such as ReCap, Overriding Trident the european student meeting in Porto and the London conference. Our members have developed skills in baking waffels, have held speaches and have taken part in a peace run through Vienna in order to raise money for important international projects, escpecially in the middle east (more than 1200€ in the last year).We translated the peace test to german and will soon start working in austrian schools. We recently gave birth to a new Student Exchange Program – ippnw StEP- which is similar to the german “Practice and Engage” project. It offers a great opportunity for exceptionally interested and engaged medical students to do a clerkship and participate in social work abroad to expand their horizons while working and living together with doctors students and social workers in foreign cultures. We hope to create longlasting relationships based on similar ideals with our partners all over the world to exchange ideas and to increase awarness for each other. The project is currently small, but will hopefully grow! Since Vienna is a city with important international organisations it would be great, to spend more time working on nuclear disarmament and disarmament in generel. It is unfortunate that the encouragement for such a task is lacking.To start with a target X in the middle of Vienna seems to be an opportunity, but there could be other achievable goals for our local students. We might even cooperate with international partners, focussing on the education of our student group! At our university we organised very successfull symposiums, dealing with topics like war and health, medicine in the context of global challenges and intercultural medicine in order to make students aware of these important issues and to expand our group of active members. For the time being, the big goal will be to integrate these topics into the medical curriculum in Vienna. In conclusion, we hope to maintain and develop our student work in order to bring the message of IPPNW to students and to extend the awareness for IPPNW topics among austrian doctors. Contact: 2nd Viennese IPPNW-Students-Symposium 
When: January 30th, 2008 IPPNW Symposium, "Medical Peace Work"
When: March 21st, 2007 View the program for this Conference here. Austrian Student Report, 2004 The Austrian IPPNW / OMEGA group was founded one and a half years ago, because the students (most of them members at IFMSA or AMSA, the Austrian branch), wanted to do devote their time to more political goals. The biggest problems for the students in Austria were on the one hand to become conscious of the group identity and to find their place within the Austrian NGO-landscape on the other. Most of the time of the monthly meetings was spent in discussing this problems and looking for suitable projects. A small but motivated group has emerged from this process and has since participated in anti-war protest marches and meetings like the Austrian Social Forum. But they’ve also begun a project called the "Open Source Software" project, which is aimed at promoting open-source software in NGO’s like IPPNW to combat the information asymmetry. In May, two workshops are planned, the first one dealing with the threat of nuclear arms, the other with ethics and palliative care. This will also be a possibility to recruit new members. A Public Health Day, organized by the IPPNW students at the university of Vienna is another step in that direction. One of the long term projects is the admission of a Global Health module into the new Curriculum and to organize the possibility for students to work in refugee camps in Austria and Macedonia. The provision of medical and psychological care for refugees within Austria is another goal. Furthermore, some Austrian students were involved with the NWIP project and are helping with the international Student Website, working on a discussion forum, open-source mailing lists, better possibilities for national reps to change their pages, and generally improving efficiency.
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