Zoom in - contribution to one billion people protected from health emergencies – WHO 13th Global Programme of Work

The WHO 13^th General Programme of Work (GPW 13) was adopted by Member States in May 2018. It has three interconnected strategic priorities to ensure healthy lives and well-being for all ages — achieving universal health coverage, addressing health emergencies and promoting healthier populations. The WHO Impact Framework focuses on making a measurable impact for people at the country level, with an emphasis on data and accountability.

The goal of having one billion people better protected from health emergencies is associated with three major outcomes: i) countries prepared for health emergencies, ii) epidemics and pandemics prevented iii) rapid detection and response to health emergencies.

The Country Health Emergency Preparedness and IHR department is responsible for measuring and making progress towards the first of those outcomes— countries prepared for health emergencies. A preparedness index has been developed to measure progress and contribute toward the strengthening of country capacities. The index provides a single metric to show the baseline national preparedness level and follow-up levels (2018-2022). The metric can be used to assess the impact of WHO and Member State efforts to increase preparedness.

The metric uses the scores of Joint External Evaluations (JEE) as external benchmarks to adjust for the self-reporting bias of the State Party Self-Assessment Annual Reporting that countries submit as a rating of their capacities. The metric is a single index, averaging the level of country implementation of all 13 IHR core capacities. The WHO goal of having one billion people better protected from health emergencies can be measured through the composite “Health Emergency Protection Index,” which employs the arithmetic means of the “Preparedness Index,” the “Prevention Index” and the “Response Index.”