Ilona Kickbusch, Adjunct Professor and Director of the Graduate Institute’s Global Health Programme, was part of a panel of independent experts commissioned by the WHO Director-General to assess the WHO’s response to the Ebola outbreak. The report was released on 7 July.
The Ebola crisis continues in great numbers of African communities still marked by fear, sorrow and sacrifice. Many international workers, including WHO staff, have likewise put their lives on the line to control the Ebola virus disease. In this context, after presenting the first progress report in May 2015, the panel has just presented the second report. The panel members divided their review and recommendations into three key areas: International Health Regulations, WHO emergency response capacity and the WHO’s role within wider health and humanitarian systems. The panel has reiterated the need for a unified programme for health emergencies to unite resources for emergencies across the three levels of the WHO. The WHO is already moving forward on some of the panel’s recommendations, including the development of the global health emergency workforce and a contingency fund to ensure the necessary resources are available to mount an initial response.
The Ebola outbreak has highlighted the separation between systems for responding to health emergencies and systems for humanitarian response, and WHO agrees they must become better integrated for future emergency responses. This includes considering ways to coordinate the grading of its humanitarian emergencies with the grading of declarations of health emergencies under International Health Regulations.
Other members of the panel included chair Barbara Stocking, President of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, Muyembe-Tamfun, Director-General of the National Institute for Biomedical Research, Democratic Republic of Congo, Faisal Shuaib, Head of the National Ebola Emergency Operations Centre, Nigeria, Carmencita Alberto-Banatin, independent consultant and advisor on health emergencies and disasters, and Julio Frenk, Professor and Dean of the Faculty, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.
Photo: WHO