WHO/Europe is launching its transition plan for COVID-19, Ednews reports citing official website of World Health Organization.
“While the international public health emergency may have ended, the pandemic certainly has not,” explained Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, Regional Director for WHO/Europe. “And as our Region seeks to emerge from this crisis, it is also faced with new health threats, at a time when our health systems face increasing workforce and other challenges.”
“Using the momentum built since 2020, now is the time to invest and sustain the gains made during the pandemic response and apply the lessons of this pandemic and other health emergencies,” continued Dr Kluge. “This is the way to increase the resilience of our health systems against future shocks.”
There is still also the very real risk of new variants emerging that could be more transmissible and/or more severe, which makes the need for continued resources into surveillance all the more critical, according to the source.
As the Region enters this new phase, countries will also have to learn to live with the virus alongside other respiratory diseases, and this means integrating COVID-19 control into broader prevention and control programmes.
As such, WHO/Europe will implement 13 strategic shifts in its approach to managing COVID-19 across the 5 core subsystems of WHO’s work in emergencies.
To help achieve this, WHO/Europe’s new transition plan provides a framework to leverage innovations and lessons from COVID-19 and other recent emergencies into the development of the next regional 5-year action plan to strengthen health emergency preparedness, response, and resilience in the WHO European Region, 2024–2029 – what WHO/Europe is calling Preparedness 2.0.
The transition plan sets out how COVID-19 activities should be managed and integrated within 5 core components of WHO's proposed global health architecture for Health Emergency Preparedness, Response and Resilience (HEPR):
— collaborative surveillance, including sustaining and building laboratory capacity and using digital tools to collect and analyse COVID-19 data;
— community protection across the emergency cycle to enable and empower communities to take informed decisions to uptake measures that protect their health in emergencies;
— clinical care, ranging from training frontline health workers and strengthening the foundations for safe, scalable, and high-quality care to ensuring sustained investment in health services and emergency care systems;
— countermeasures, such as learning from and sustaining the COVID-19 vaccination roll-out as part of wider immunization efforts; and
— coordination, from hazard-specific COVID-19 and influenza pandemic response plans to integrated respiratory virus pandemic planning.
Recall that across Europe and central Asia, more than 270 million people have been infected by COVID-19 and over 2.2 million people have died from the disease since January 2020.
