Senior Health Policy Advisor at the WHO Regional Office for Europe, WCO in Budapest, Hungary

Pavlos N. Theodorakis, MD, MSc, DipLSHTM, PhD, is a Senior Health Policy Advisor at the WHO Regional Office for Europe, WCO in Budapest, Hungary.

He joined the WHO European Centre for Primary Health Care, in Almaty, in July 2016, and was appointed in 2017 as the technical co-lead, and the WHO Regional Focal Point for the Alma-Ata 40 Anniversary Conference and the drafting of the Astana Declaration on PHC, as well as a member of the Alma-Ata 40 Coordination Team organizing the Global Conference on PHC that took place in Astana in October 2018. Between 2020-2022 he served as a Senior Health Policy Advisor at the WCO in Moscow, Russia, while he successfully led the implementation of three new offices (a sub-regional office on quality of care and patient safety in Athens, a project office in Bucharest to provide technical assistance for the implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania, and a WHO Country Office in Larnaca, Cyprus). He also led a joint team of the Greek Ministry of Health and the WHO CO in Greece, developing the National Mental Health Action Plan for Greece 2023 – 2030.

Before joining WHO, he served as the CEO & Chairman of the Attica Mental Health Hospitals Trust, (2013-2015) and the Psychiatric Hospital of Chania (2004-2006) in Greece and closed it down after deinstitutionalizing all of its patients and establishing the first ever comprehensive community mental health network in the country.