WRC5 Technical Session: COVID-19 Whole of Society Recovery Priorities for Health System Strengthening Following a Risk Management Approach

Watch this session on-demand 

It is vital that countries strategize their recovery actions based on learning from COVID-19, adopting innovations and building on thorough assessments. This will ensure that health systems are consistently building back better towards a sustainable recovery by integrating risk management measures to protect communities from impacts of health emergencies, including future epidemics and pandemics and climate related extreme weather events.

Increasing investment in health systems and all-hazards emergency risk management, e.g. building strong risk informed primary health care, investing in essential public health functions, and institutionalizing mechanisms for whole-of society engagement are necessary for building more resilient and sustainable communities.

In this session, policy options for recovery, pandemic lessons learned, and strategies for strengthening health systems resilience will be discussed. A focus will be put on how research and innovation and capacities built during the pandemic response phase can be systematically leveraged to guide management of health risks in recovery.

Session 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 system 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