Public Health Emergency Preparedness

Public health emergency preparedness is the branch of public health concerned with building the surveillance, workforce, funding and coordination capacity a health system needs before a crisis such as an infectious disease outbreak, a natural disaster or a bioterrorism event arrives, rather than assembling that capacity for the first time once the crisis has already begun. Its modern global institutional form is the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Programme, established on 1 July 2016 at the request of the World Health Assembly, after the slow response to the 2014 to 2015 Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa led Director General Margaret Chan to convene an Advisory Group on Reform of WHO's Work in Outbreaks and Emergencies. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/