IPPNW Medical Student Movement

As the next generation of health professionals, IPPNW medical students are already playing an active role in safeguarding the planet’s health.

Working with IPPNW affiliated organizations throughout the world, medical students show by example and are changing how social responsibility is imagined, developed and deployed.

IPPNW medical students work on many projects to promote peace, disarmament, and human rights.

Work to Prevent Nuclear War: Because nuclear weapons remain the greatest immediate threat to human survival, IPPNW students help educate fellow students and the public about nuclear weapons and the consequences of nuclear warfare. Exhibitions and lectures are the most common tools, but street actions such as Target X have also proven effective.

Nuclear Weapons Inheritance Project (NWIP): Through NWIP, IPPNW medical students aim to raise awareness about the political and humanitarian consequences of security policies relying on military power and nuclear weapons. NWIP workshop organizers also focus on empowering younger generations to undertake disarmament activities on local, regional and international level.

Students have organized workshops in the Netherlands, Germany and the Philippines, a workshop on refugees in Finland, landmines workshops in Norway, and workshops in Romania and the UK on nuclear weapons, among others.

Refugee Camp Project (RECAP): Founded in 2003, IPPNW students developed RECAP to help refugees in Chiapas, Zambia, the Netherlands, Germany, Philippines and Yugoslavia. The goal of RECAP is to support medical health care projects and to give medical students more awareness about the life in a refugee camp. The target group in the refugee camps is children and adolescents aged 8-15 years.

Exchange Programs: MedEx is a multilateral student exchange program offered by IPPNW to our student members. With the help of our IPPNW affiliates around the world, we are able to offer students a unique exchange program which encompasses both clinical and social service experience. To date, we have opportunities available in Canada, Kenya, Philippines, Zambia, and Egypt. Programs will run for 8 weeks, with 4 weeks devoted to clinical work and the remaining 4 weeks with an IPPNW social service project.

Network and Communication: In order to maintain communication, medical students hold annual regional meetings where students from the same part of the world meet and evaluate projects, exchange experiences and make plans for the future. Once every second year students gather at the IPPNW World Congress. Hundreds of students from all nine IPPNW regions met in Basel, Switzerland in 2010 for the 16th World Congress. The Congress is not only an opportunity for students to meet each other, but also a chance to meet socially responsible doctors.

More information about the IPPNW student movement can be found on the medical student website!

• Student Chapters
• Student Leadership

“We cannot rest on the laurels of the many significant achievements of IPPNW when 40,000 children die daily from remediable causes, when nearly a billion people will enter the 21st century unable to read a road sign, when hundreds of millions are homeless and without the most elementary needs for decent subsistence.

"There can be no peace without justice. Our work is far from done. It is with you, our future leaders, that the fate of humanity rests.”

— Bernard Lown, MD, IPPNW Founding Co-President