With thanks to Shams Syed, WHO. Selected extracts and comment from me below.
CITATION: Bull World Health Organ. 2022 Apr 1; 100(4): 240–240A.
Published online 2022 Apr 1. doi: 10.2471/BLT.22.287843
WHO recommendations for resilient health systems
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus et al.
https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8958831/
EXTRACTS (selected by NPW)
Despite our collective experience with public health emergencies, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has demonstrated that national health systems were poorly prepared for a pandemic of this scale...
WHO calls on leaders and policy-makers within health, finance and other sectors to act on the seven recommendations of the position paper on building health systems resilience to:
(i) leverage the current response to strengthen both pandemic preparedness and health systems;
(ii) invest in essential public health functions including those needed for all-hazards emergency risk management;
(iii) build a strong primary health-care foundation;
(iv) invest in institutionalized mechanisms for whole-of-society engagement;
(v) create and promote enabling environments for research, innovation and learning;
(vi) increase domestic and global investment in health system foundations and all-hazards emergency risk management; and
(vii) address pre-existing inequities and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on marginalized and vulnerable populations.
COMMENT (Neil PW): Our current WHO-HIFA project on Maintaining essential health services during COVID-19 (and beyond) aims to promote an enabling environmment for research, innovation and learning around how to increase the resilience of health systems in the face of public health emergencies. https://www.hifa.org/projects/essential-health-services-and-covid-19
See also our complementary sister project: Learning for quality health services https://www.hifa.org/projects/learning-quality-health-services
Best wishes, Neil
Neil Pakenham-Walsh, Global Coordinator HIFA, www.hifa.org neil@hifa.org
