A three-day Orientation Workshop on National Action Plan for Health Security was held in Dhaka Bangladesh from 17-19 July 2018 with over 40 participants and observers from 10 countries of the region. WHO Headquarters, the South East Asia Regional Office and the Country Offices together organized this Regional Workshop. The three-step strategic framework of WHO – ‘NAPHS for All’ was discussed in-depth along with the NAPHS toolkit in this workshop.

The purpose of the workshop was to train the National Focal Persons for International Health Regulations and WHO professionals working at country and regional levels to be able to provide support to and coordinate the NAPHS process. This orientation workshop enabled them to provide adequate support to Member States to develop a 5-year NAPHS, based on the Joint External Evaluation recommendations and other complementary assessments. The orientation workshop was aimed at standardizing and streamlining the process of NAPHS development including the use of the WHO planning matrix and costing tool.

This workshop provided a platform to discuss the NAPHS Framework, and hands-on training on the WHO planning and costing tool. The workshop created the opportunity to share good practices from the countries in the Region with regard to health security planning highlighting the country and regional perspectives. The countries in the Region are embarking on health security planning aligning evidence from different country-level assessments including State Party Annual Reporting, Joint External Evaluation, Strategic Risk Assessment, After Action Reviews, Simulation Exercises, Performance of Veterinary Services, etc. The strategic partnership to support implementation and the coordination of in-country stakeholders was discussed in the context of financing of the NAPHS. Four countries in the Region are already making good progress with health security planning with WHO support and three additional countries have initiated preparations for health security planning.

The workshop concluded with country-specific courses of action to complete the planning and accelerate the implementation of priority actions to scale up health security in countries and in the Region.