Informal Consultation on Emergency Operations Centre and Response Logistics
15 to 17 May 2012
Background information
In recent years, countries and the international community have exerted tremendous effort in confronting threats from emerging diseases. Likewise, the World Health Organization, countries and areas in the Asia Pacific including donors and partner agencies have recognized the need for a common regional strategic framework.
Asia Pacific Strategy for Emerging Diseases (2010) has been designed to promote public health security through preparedness planning, prevention, early detection and rapid response to emerging diseases and other public health emergencies. To ensure that each of these issues is addressed, APSED (2010) identifies key focus areas with specific components.
Public health Emergency Preparedness is a new APSED focus area. The Emergency Operations Centre is a physical location within the Ministry of Health - a place that allows the Ministerial staff to coordinate their activities in a public health emergency utilizing the well-known, well characterized and established incident management system. This incident management system has several key components that facilitate a coordinated response to emergencies including response logistics. Therefore, response logistics should be seen as a supporting professional element for the Ministry of Health in general and as a key functional element within the Emergency Operation Centre. Both the Public Health Emergency Plan (PHEP) and the Emergency Operation Centre enable timely decision making and response that are required due to the rapidly changing nature of public health emergencies, increasing public pressure, and legal requirements under the International Health Regulations (IHR). The PHEP and Emergency Operations Centre also provide important links with other focus areas or components through providing the streamlined structure to connect them such as surveillance, risk assessments, response, risk communication, response logistics, coordination of surge capacity and health care facility, and point of entry preparedness.
In concert with the establishment of an Emergency Operations Centre within the Ministry of Health, the enhancement of response logistics capacity should be seen as a key component of the entire focus area as the PHEP is implemented. Consultations with Member States revealed that logistics is not well understood in health agencies and organizations and systems and structures for logistics do not currently exist in many health agencies. Logistics support in response to emerging infectious disease outbreaks and other public health emergencies involves more than supply-procurement functions as the nature of these events often requires support for wider issues such as pharmaceutical regulation, communication, human resources, safety and security.
To ensure a common understanding and effective implementation of these APSED (2010) components, it is proposed that an informal consultation on Emergency Operations Centre and Response Logistics be held from 15 to 17 May 2012 in Manila, Philippines.
The objectives of this informal consultation are:
- to agree on the role of the Emergency Operations Centre in public health emergencies preparedness and response;
- to agree on the role of the Emergency Operations Centre in public health emergencies preparedness and response;
- to determine how to establish response logistics functions and systems within the Ministries of Health;