World Reconstruction Conference 5 (Reconstructing a sustainable future: Building resilience through recovery in a COVID-19) Transformed World)  Bali, Indonesia - ISS-G20 Laboratorium Repository

Background/Rationale

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted gaps and challenges in the preparedness of health systems and allied sectors in even those with mature health systems, unmasking vulnerabilities. While the pandemic caused direct and indirect health impacts as well as socioeconomic ramifications across all parts of societies, it also disproportionately affected vulnerable and marginalized populations, often depleting their resilience and pushing them beyond their coping capacities. The loss from such devastating impacts is unfathomable and pushes back countries’ development gains, including for Universal Health Coverage and other health related SDGs, which poses challenges for COVID-19 recovery.  It is hence vital that countries strategize their recovery actions based on the lessons learned from COVID-19, building on the ongoing preparedness and response to the pandemic including institutionalising capacities that are put in place for managing the current response, and adopting those innovations to maintain essential services safely that will lead to better preparedness and resonse in the future for similar and other health emergencies . This will support countries to effectively build back better and strengthen the preparedness of health systems through implementation of IHR (2005) capacities and will also advance health system resilience through PHC based service delivery capacities.

In this session, national policy options to enhance recovery from COVID-19 will be discussed, with the focus on identifying lessons from the pandemic that must be scaled-up to strengthen health system resilience based on the interdependent goals of Universal Health Coverage through the PHC approach, and health security. A focus will be put on how the research and innovation generated and capacities build during the COVID-19 pandemic response phase and how these can be systematically leveraged to effectively guide the management of health risks in recovery, complying with International Health Regulations (IHR) and ensuring Universal Health Coverage (UHC).

Objectives

• Highlight the impacts of the pandemic on the health sector, including how it affected vulnerable groups, including women and girls disproportionately.
• Share lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and discuss how well informed strategies can be applied to build more resilient health systems that protect communities from crisis.
• Advocate WHO’s policy approaches for health sytem recovery, that bring together and integrate PHC based health systems for UHC with health security and essential public health functions.
• Promote core concepts that apply to operationalizing risk informed Building Back Better, using whole of society and whole of government principles and partnerships from global to national levels focusing on ‘health’ as central to socio-economic recovery and development for a gender sensitive and inclusive post COVID-19 recovery

Documents

1. Building health systems resilience for universal health coverage and health security during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond: WHO position paper. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-UHL-PHC-SP-2021.01
2. COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan (SPRP 2021) https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-WHE-2021.02
3. Health emergency and disaster risk management framework (https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/326106)
4. Everyone’s business: Whole-of-society action to manage health risks and reduce socioeconomic impacts of emergencies and disasters: https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/3394

Entire content available on: https://www.who.int/news-room/events/detail/2022/05/23/default-calendar/global-platform-for-disaster-risk-reduction-2022--bali--indonesia