Bispebjerg Hospital
Who did Özlem Cekic work for from 2000 to 2004?
Özlem Cekic Özlem Sara Cekic ( born 7 May 1976 ) is a Danish-Kurdish former politician and member of parliament for the Socialist Peoples Party ( SF ) . She is now General-Secretary of the organisation Brobyggerne ( The Bridge-builders ) - Center for Dialog Coffee . She is also a well renowned author , speaker , advisor and active in the public debate , especially around humanitarian issues . A nurse by training she was first elected to the central committee of the Socialist Peoples Party in 2004 . In the 2007 elections , she became a member of the Danish parliament , the first female MP with a Muslim immigrant background . She was her partys spokesperson for health related issues . She left the party in 2016 due to disagreements around refugee policy and is today not a member of any party . In 2018 she was only the second Dane to be invited to give TED talk in New York about her invention of Dialogue Coffee , a new way of meeting and communicating even with the people with whom you might disagree . Early life . Born in Ankara , Turkey , from a Kurdish background she arrived in Denmark via several other countries including Finland as a 10- year old young child and grew up in Copenhagens Vesterbro neighborhood . Cekic was the first in her family to seek an education , graduated from High School in 1996 and finished her Nursing Education in 2000 . She then worked at various hospitals including at the neopaediatric ward at Rigshospitalet , and several psychiatric positions working with traumatised refugees and immigrants at Sankt Hans Hospital and abusers at street level at the child and youth ward at Bispebjerg Hospital . During this period she became the first Board Member from a minority background of Danish Nursing Faculty ( sygeplejeraad ) and she also set up the Diversity Network which worked to highlight the discrimination that Danes with a different ethnic background received in the Danish Health Service . At 20 she entered a marriage arranged by her parents , but at age 26 she decided to divorce and raise her child alone . She was encouraged by her maternal grandmother who told her that she should strive never to be dependent on anybody , least of all on men . She remarried in 2006 with a Kurdish man and has a further 2 children . Cekic is a muslim but believes religion and politic should be separated . Political career . Cekic joined SF after the election in 2001 . She stood for the first time in 2005 and got 168 personal votes . In 2007 she was elected as the first Muslim woman and the first immigrant with 4533 personal votes which increased in 2011 to 5383 and 2015 to 6542 personal votes . However even if she was the second highest vote taker in her party , she lost her seat in 2015 due to the bad performance overall by the party . During her time in Parliament Cekic was the partys lead spokesman on many different issues including health , culture , social issues and equality . As such she participated in select committees in these areas as well as Foreign Affairs . She chaired the Parliament Social Select Committee for 2 years . She was also a member of the Danish delegation to the European Parliament from 2013-2015 In 2012 Cekic decided to vote against the tax reform proposed by her own party in collaboration with the Social Democrats . Cekic argued that the reform was socially lopsided , reallocating funds from the socially marginalized to the upper and middle class , saying that I oppose the part of the agreement that takes money from people on disability pensions , social security and early pensions to give tax reductions to the rich . The party leadership requested that she vote with the party line , but she refused and consequently lost her posts as spokeswoman for Social Policy , gender equality and housing although she remained a member of the party . After Annette Vilhelmsen became the new party leader in September 2012 , Cekic was given the post as spokesperson on health related issues . In August 2013 , she also became spokeswoman for gender equality again . In 2015 during a public debate Cekic was told by the Chairman of the Danish Party , Poul Madsen that it was time she got sent back to Turkey ! After losing her seat in 2015 she started looking into how she could convert the huge personal support she had to better use outside parliament and despite being offered a safe seat to return to parliament by the party , she decided that her new work building bridges between people and various groups of people was more important and rewarding , so she declined the offer and left party politics for good . In March 2017 she also left SF as a member after the party decided to support a proposal closing the door completely for unaccompanied refugee children . This was simply one step too far for Cekic to continue to be associated with that party . In 2009 she published the autobiographical book Fra Føtex til Folketinget ( Gyldendal ) [ English : From Føtex to Parliament ] , in which she recounted her experiences as a politically progressive Muslim woman from a working-class background . Among her experiences of discrimination in Danish society she recounts how her teacher told children with immigrant backgrounds that it is incredible to see how much you struggle , while knowing that youll never achieve anything , and how the Danish midwife who refused to address Cekic by name even once during her 23-hour labor , because it was too hard to pronounce . Cekic also tells how she got in trouble during her years in the Nurses Union , when she criticized the fact that the union leaders salary was higher than that of the Danish prime Minister . In the 2015 Danish general elections the Socialist Peoples Party ( SF ) lost 9 of its 16 seats in parliament and Cekic was not re-elected . External links . - ozlem.dk - Personal Website