Strategic Objective 1: Governance, Leadership & Partnerships

Session Description:

The recently established Global Health Emergency Corps (GHEC) is part of the WHO Director-General's vision for strengthening global health emergency preparedness, response and resilience (HEPR). The GHEC is a globally distributed body of national professionals with the common objectives of strengthening health emergency responses and stopping the next pandemic. GHEC provides both a framework for enhancing health emergency workforce capacity, recognizing the need to invest in coordinated leadership, deployable and interoperable surge response capacities, and a well-practiced health emergency workforce centered in countries; and a collaboration platform for countries and health emergency networks to collectively address the gaps, identify best practices, areas for collaboration, cross-fertilization and common learning.

The EMT Initiative, in conjunction with other existing global emergency response networks such as Global Health Cluster, GOARN and EOC-NET form a critical part of the interoperable surge capacities level within the GHEC framework.

In this “bigger picture” session, participants will gain an overview of GHEC as an umbrella structure for global health emergency preparedness and response based on country capacities, understand regional plans for adaptation and implementation of the GHEC approach, recognize the alignment of GHEC’s vision with the EMT2030 strategy and identify the key role of EMTs as part of GHEC, and discuss opportunities for enhanced collaboration and synergistic actions with other networks and entities across the interoperable surge capacities level.