Branches
Public Health Emergency Preparedness
Also Known As PHEP
Systems and Policy Field
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Public health emergency preparedness is the branch of public health concerned with building the surveillance, workforce, funding and coordination capacity a health system needs before a crisis such as an infectious disease outbreak, a natural disaster or a bioterrorism event arrives, rather than assembling that capacity for the first time once the crisis has already begun. Its modern global institutional form is the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Programme, established on 1 July 2016 at the request of the World Health Assembly, after the slow response to the 2014 to 2015 Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa led Director General Margaret Chan to convene an Advisory Group on Reform of WHO's Work in Outbreaks and Emergencies.
Facts
Central QuestionSourced to the subject's own accountHow much outbreak and disaster readiness a health system should fund and maintain in the years when no emergency is under way, against every other competing use for the same money. 1 Key DebateSourced to the subject's own accountThe 2014 to 2015 Ebola epidemic in West Africa became the field's own turning point: the World Health Organization's slow response led directly to the Health Emergencies Programme's creation, which the WHO funded for its first operational year with an additional 494 million dollars, of which only 140 million dollars had actually been received by April 2016, a gap the field still points to as evidence that emergency preparedness attracts real financial commitment mainly during a crisis rather than in the years between them. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
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