The WHO’s Guidance for Conducting a Country COVID-19 Intra-Action Review (IAR) and its accompanying tools were developed and published on 23 July 2020 to support countries to conduct periodic review(s) of their national and subnational COVID-19 outbreak response. The goal is to ensure countries do not miss critical opportunities for learning and improvement to better respond to the COVID-19 outbreak in their countries, especially as the possibility of a protracted pandemic becomes increasingly probable.

An IAR provides an opportunity to bring multisectoral responders together to review the functional capacity of the public health and emergency response systems at the national and subnational levels. During the IAR, participants can collectively identify practical areas that need immediate remediation or can be targeted for sustained improvement of the outbreak response.

The purpose of a country COVID-19 IAR is fourfold:

• to provide an opportunity to share experiences and collectively analyse the ongoing in-country response to COVID-19 by identifying challenges and best practices;
• 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 had demonstrated success and by preventing recurrent errors;
• to document and apply the lessons learned from the response efforts to date to enable health system strengthening;
• to provide a basis for updating and validating the country’s COVID-19 strategic preparedness and response plan and other strategic plans accordingly.

The fourth meeting of the Emergency Committee convened by the WHO Director-General under the International Health Regulations (IHR) (2005) regarding the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) which took place on 31 July 2020 also emphasized the need for IARs. The Emergency Committee advised the WHO Secretariat to “continue to distill and rapidly communicate lessons learned and best practices from the COVID-19 pandemic and national intra-action reviews” and issued temporary recommendations to State Parties to “share best practices, including from intra-action reviews, with WHO”.

WHO has a team dedicated to supporting countries for the successful planning and implementation of the IARs. Please see more information in the links below:

• Guidance for conducting a country COVID-19 intra-action review (IAR)
• Statement on the fourth meeting of the International Health Regulations (2005) Emergency Committee regarding the outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19)