WHO Expert Group Consultation on Health Systems for Health Security

A joint consultation between WHO Emergencies Programme and the Health Systems Governance and Financing cluster brought together forty experts from Member States, partners, international organizations, non-state actors, academia and WHO, to develop a framework identifying the key health system elements needed for health security, and a methodology to estimate the costs of achieving those capacities.  The experts defined key health system elements that could be leveraged to achieve health security at different levels (community, intermediate, national and supra-national) and identified additional elements that are not captured in the IHR (2005) assessments, for inclusion.

This consultation will allow WHO to further develop the health systems for health security framework, building on the priority actions that emerged. These included mapping WHO benchmarks for IHR (2005) capacities against different levels of health system capacities, defining which key elements are not captured by the benchmarks and developing case studies to facilitate country awareness and implementation of the framework. WHO will also use the consultation inputs to refine the methodology to estimate costs in achieving the country health system capacities that are required to effectively deal with health emergencies.