It says the organisation was too slow in its response to the Ebola epidemic and that it was under-funded. The efforts to contain the virus were slow due to “a hope that the crisis could be managed by good diplomacy”, the report said, citing WHO’s excessive concern for “country politics”.
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[Ebola’s lessons, painfully learned at great cost in dollars and human lives]. That was one of the only bright spots in the report for the WHO.
“The Ebola crisis not only exposed organizational failings in the functioning of WHO, but it also demonstrated shortcomings in the global Health Regulations”, the report’s executive summary states.
Member states need to show the political will to assist WHO with the resources to respond to health emergencies, and countries and their partners should immediately contribute to the $100 million contingency fund to support early outbreak response, the report said. “The world simply can not afford another period of inaction until the next health crisis”.
The WHO agreed with the panel’s recommendation that its health emergency systems needs better integration with humanitarian response systems, including closer coordination of humanitarian emergency grading and IHR emergency declarations.
But she said there were a number of reasons for this, such as there being little access to data in the affected countries, their governments being unwilling to declare the problem, and “nervousness” from WHO after it was severely criticised for calling a public health emergency for swine flu. Liberia was seen as a success story when, with neighbours Guinea and Sierra Leone still struggling to end the outbreak, it was declared free of the virus on May 9.
There has been a cry out by the Global health experts for donors to invest in sustainable actions that will benefit the whole healthcare infrastructure and not just high profile diseases or expensive surveillance systems if epidemics of the scale of the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa are to be averted. In response to the resolution, WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan established a panel to undertake this work.
As for WHOs health emergency response capacity, the agency said that it is already moving forward on some of the panels recommendations including the development of the global health emergency workforce and the contingency fund to ensure the necessary resources are available to mount an initial response.
The report said it must make urgent “fundamental changes, particularly in terms of leadership and decision-making processes”, with the help of its 194 member states. “You are always trying to prevent a situation coming through or grab it when it starts and really get it under control very fast and those are some of the internal changes that have to be made at World Health Organization”, she told the BBC.
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While Liu noted that the panel credited World Health Organization on researching experimental treatments, she’s focused on how about 20 new cases a week continue to fall through the cracks without knowing who they contracted the illness from or how.
