Country COVID-19 Intra-Action Review (IAR) Training Muscat, Oman - 10/11 November 2021

Oman, as all the countries in the Region, has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic with the first case detected on 24 February 2020 and the first death reported on 31 March 2020. Still countries globally are suffering to respond adequately to this pandemic and still more and more daily cases and deaths are resulting from this pandemic, and in order to improve the response of health systems, it has become necessary to conduct a review of the measures taken by countries in addressing the pandemic.

Therefore, the Sultanate of Oman requested the technical support of WHO for a two-day training session of Intra-Action Review (IAR) conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office, in collaboration with the WHO Oman Country Office and Ministry of Health of Oman. Under the auspice of His Excellency Dr Ahmed Al Saidi, Minister of Health Oman, the training took place over 2 days, on 10 and 11 November 2021, and was held in Muscat, the capital of Oman.

Oman has been responding to the pandemic, since the first day, fully with the best capacities to mitigate its impact on the population. The leadership was shown when His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tariq, establishing a national supreme committee for COVID-19 response, with a technical committee established and chaired by H.E. the Minister of Health. The National and governorate incident command chain and public health emergency has been activated. The National Research Council funded many research projects for COVID-19 for both public health and clinical medicine. Hospitals treating COVID-19 patients have taken part in the WHO clinical management trials.

WHO has recently developed a guidance for conducting a Country Intra-Action Review (IAR) for the COVID-19 response, as the pandemic becomes increasingly protracted. The guidance is accompanied by different tools for countries to conduct periodic reviews of their response during this pandemic. A Country COVID-19 IAR is a country-led facilitated process that allows stakeholders of the ongoing COVID-19 response to review the functional capacities of public health and emergency response systems at the national or subnational levels to identify best practices, gaps and lessons learned, and propose corrective measures and actions for immediate remediation or sustained improvement of the COVID-19 outbreak response. There is also an online course developed by WHO that consists of four modules, quizzes after each module and a final assessment that would support remotely the countries while conducting the review.

The Country COVID-19 (IAR) was facilitated by a team from the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region, lead by Dr Dalia Samhouri, Regional Manager, Emergency Preparedness and IHR. Dr Samhouri mentioned during her speech that the efforts of the government of Oman are highly appreciated, as the first country in the region to have this training on reviewing the response to COVID-19. She highlighted the importance of bringing all sectors and partners in the review process, the role of communities in the response and the need to review the response at the different administrative levels. She added that this was a great opportunity not only to identify gaps to improve the response to COVID-19 but also to identify areas of improvement for strengthening the health system and building resilient health system that is cable to prevent and rapidly response to different threats and emergencies.

The opening ceremony of the training was attended by His Excellency Dr Ahmed Al Saidi, Minister of Health Oman, Dr Jean Jabbour, WHO Representative Oman, Ms. Nora Haddad, the FAO Representative in Oman and other officials from the Ministry of Health.

The training’s main objectives were: 

• To provide an opportunity to share experiences and guide the MoH team regarding the IAR tool that will be used for the review mission of the ongoing in-country response to COVID-19 by identifying challenges and best practices.
• To discuss how to facilitate consensus building among and the compiling of lessons learned by various stakeholders during the response to improve the current response by sustaining best practices that have demonstrated success and by preventing recurrent errors during the IAR.
• To train the participants on documenting and applying lessons learned from the response efforts to date to enable health systems strengthening

In this context the training was conducted for 2-days, with the aim of building the capacity at national and provincial levels on how to conduct an Intra-Action Review (IAR) and to get familiar with the used tool, as IAR relies primarily on the personal experience and perceptions of individuals involved in the response to assess what worked and what did not, why and how to improve.