The WHO Documentation Centre based on Central Public Health Research Institute of the Ministry of Health of Russia was established in 1994 by the Order of the Ministry of Health No.124 of June 22, 1994.

The goal of the WHO documentation centre is disseminating the information provided by the WHO Regional Office for Europe as widely as possible within the territory of Russia.

The new politics and strategy pursued by the WHO Regional Office for Europe for information products and services aim at providing healthcare policy makers in the European region and beyond with premium quality, relevant and valid information.

The WHO Documentation Centre should fulfill the following core functions:

• Organization and management
  Collection, indexation, cataloguing and storage of WHO information products, provision of information upon request on different health problems, and collaboration with other health libraries.
• Dissemination
  Electronic and/or hard copy dissemination of WHO information products to the relevant target audiences within the country, as well as to national medical, public health and professional journals that should receive updated copies of the WHO information products.
• Evaluation
  Evaluation of the info utilization and feedback from information consumers on different forms of the WHO information products (i.e. number of loans).

Currently available at the Documentation Centre:

• More than 1700 documents issued by the WHO in Russian, English, French, and German, which have been received from the WHO Regional Office for Europe in Copenhagen, and the WHO Headquarters, Geneva;
• WHO Documentation Centre database in English and in Russian with summaries in Russian of all WHO publications available at the Centre.

WHO publications available at the Centre include:

• Books (guidelines, monographs, etc.).
• Proceedings of conferences, seminars, working-group workshops, and other WHO meetings on various problems of medicine and health care.
• Documents of the World Health Assembly sessions, the WHO Executive Board and the WHO Regional Committee for Europe.
• Statistics collections, including the World Health Statistics Annual, the Weekly Epidemiological Record and other.
• Collected international laws.
• Journals: Bulletin of the World Health Organization, World Health Forum, World Health, Entre Nous in Russian and in English.
• WHO Technical Report Series of the main subjects of medicine and health care.

WHO Documentation Centre provides the following:

• Collection, indexing and storage of WHO documents;
• Consumers work with originals of WHO documents in the reading room;
• Photocopying of WHO documents and post-mail sending upon request;
• Preparation of analytical materials on selected health problems using WHO documents upon request (on a preliminary agreement basis);
• Topical retrieval on databases with summaries of WHO documents by e-mail, on diskettes or hard copies;
• Consumer teaching of web-side using;
• Sending existing electronic files of WHO documents via e-mail as requested

Please, see on-line copies of WHO documents on the web-page of the WHO Regional Office for Europe: www.euro.who.int