Prof Neville Calleja qualified as a medical doctor in 1999 and proceeded to study Medical Statistics and Public Health after his medical training. He qualified as a specialist in public health medicine in 2006 and was awarded Membership of the Faculty of Public Health in the UK in 2011. In 2013, Neville completed his PhD studies on the statistical correction of misclassification of disease status between self-reported and examined health surveys.
He has been employed at the Directorate for Health Information and Statistics within the Ministry responsible for Health since 2001, taking on its helm in 2007, and also served as Acting Chief Medical Officer during 2014 and 2015. As part of the Chief Medical Officer's office, Neville has been long involved in the drafting of strategies and the planning of capital projects within the Ministry for Health in Malta.
Prof Calleja has fifteen years of experience lecturing medical statistics, epidemiology and public health to all health care professionals, together with ethical and scientific review of projects at local and international level.
He is also active at European level in the field of Health Information for both the European Commission and WHO (Europe), as chair of the European Health Information Initiative within WHO(Europe). Prior to this, he was the first chair of the Small Countries Health Information Network for WHO(Europe) and he is still an active member of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Health Systems and Policies in Small States within the Islands and Small States Institute within the University of Malta.
Prof Calleja has been active on a number of collaborative research projects, particularly in the area of health information, funded by the EU Public Health Programme, and also the EU Research Framework Programmes. He has also been in receipt of EUROSTAT grants for development of statistical framework at national level. Within his latest project, JA InfAct, he is leading an exercise which is piloting a WHO-designed peer-review health information system assessment methodology in nine participating countries.
