Charles Kleiber (b. 9 December 1942 in Moutier) is a former Swiss state secretary.
Moutier is a municipality in the Jura bernois administrative district in the canton of Bern in Switzerland. It is located in the French-speaking Bernese Jura.
Educated as an architect at EPFL (1968), he worked as a consultant in hospital architecture during the 1970s. In 1981, he became director of the public health department of the canton Vaud. He submitted a PhD thesis on the topic of the impact of economic incentives on performance in medical care in 1991 at the University of Lausanne (published as Questions des soins with Payot, Lausanne, 1991). Kleiber was appointed director general of the university hospitals of Lausanne in 1992.
Public health has been defined as "the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting human health through organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals". Analyzing the health of a population and the threats it faces is the basis for public health. The public can be as small as a handful of people or as large as a village or an entire city; in the case of a pandemic it may encompass several continents. The concept of health takes into account physical, psychological and social well-being. As such, according to the World Health Organization, it is not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
The University of Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland was founded in 1537 as a school of theology, before being made a university in 1890. As of fall 2017, about 15,000 students and 3,300 employees study and work at the university. Approximately 1,500 international students attend the university, which has a wide curriculum including exchange programs with world-renowned universities.
In 1997, he became State Secretary for Education and Research, at the time part of the Federal Department of Home Affairs, where he remained until his retirement in 2007. He opted to sign the Bologna declaration for Switzerland, against the resistance of the Swiss university rectors, initiating the controversial Bologna Process of university reforms. [1]
The Federal Department of Home Affairs is a department of the federal administration of Switzerland and serves as the Swiss ministry of the interior. As of 2012, it is headed by Federal Councillor Alain Berset.
The Bologna declaration is the main guiding document of the Bologna process. It was adopted by ministers of education of 29 European countries at their meeting in Bologna in 1999.
The Bologna Process is a series of ministerial meetings and agreements between European countries to ensure comparability in the standards and quality of higher-education qualifications. The process has created the European Higher Education Area under the Lisbon Recognition Convention. It is named after the University of Bologna, where the Bologna declaration was signed by education ministers from 29 European countries in 1999. The process was opened to other countries in the European Cultural Convention of the Council of Europe, and governmental meetings have been held in Prague (2001), Berlin (2003), Bergen (2005), London (2007) and Leuven (2009).
