Public health emergency operation centres: status, gaps and areas for improvement in the Eastern Mediterranean Region.

The functionality of Public Health Emergency Operations Centres (PHEOCs) in countries is vital to their response capacity. The article assesses the status of National PHEOCs in the 22 countries of the Eastern Mediterranean Region. We designed and administered an online survey between May and June 2021. Meetings and Key Informant Interviews were also conducted with the emergency focal points in the WHO country offices and with other select partners. We also collected data on PHEOCs from the Joint External Evaluations conducted in the Region between 2016 and 2018 in 18 countries, and intra-action review mission reports conducted in 11 countries to review the response to COVID-19 during May 2020-June 2021 - and other relevant mission reports. Only 12 countries reported having PHEOC with varying levels of functionality and 10 of them reported using PHEOC for their response operations. This review formed the baseline of capacity requirements of National PHEOC in each country and will facilitate identifying benchmarks of areas of improvement for future national, WHO and partners support.

Leveraging the COVID-19 response to improve emergency care systems in the Eastern Mediterranean Region

[...]work has been done to support implementation of a package of emergency care tools including: the Integrated Interagency Triage Tool (prehospital, routine and mass casualty);Emergency Medical and Trauma Care Checklists;the Basic Emergency Care - an open-access training course for frontline health-care providers who manage acute illness and injury with limited resources;and the International Registry of Trauma and Emergency care to help gather essential data about the performance of emergency care systems (6,7). Despite countries' efforts to control patient flow by directing suspected COVID-19 patients to dedicated facilities, many "self-present" to facilities of their choosing. [...]patients presenting for unrelated emergencies (e.g., trauma) may also be co-infected with COVID-19 - whether or not they are symptomatic. Additionally, many EMR countries lack legislation guaranteeing access to emergency care for all (a key WHO Health System Building Block under governance), which limits access to marginal communities (10). Since the Region is host to the largest number of displaced persons in the world, region-specific guidance has been developed to guide health system response to COVID-19 in the context of displacement (22). [...]there is a paucity of high-quality published data on emergency care systems in the Region and an urgent need for operational research to understand the emergency care needs and emergency care systems performance in EMR countries.

Leveraging the COVID-19 response to improve emergency care systems in the Eastern Mediterranean Region.

The COVID-19 pandemic began as a cluster of reported cases of acute respiratory illness in China on 31 December 2019 and went on to spread with exponential growth across the globe. By the time it was characterized as a global pandemic on 11 March 2020, 17 of 22 countries in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) had reports of infected persons. EMR countries are particularly susceptible to such outbreaks due to the presence of globally interconnected markets; complex emergencies in more than half of the countries; religious mass gatherings that draw tens of millions of pilgrims annually; and variation in emergency care systems capacity and health systems performance within and between countries.