16 Mar 2015, 03:08 pm Print
“If we're going to come out of emergencies in good shape, we're going to have to go into them with healthier, more resilient populations,” said Dr. Bruce Aylward, Assistant Director General for Emergencies at the UN World Health Organization (WHO), briefing reporters in Sendai at the Third World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction.
Noting that the aim of the current conference, which opened yesterday and wraps up Wednesday 18 March, is to agree a new set of measures for managing disaster risk to reduce mortality and curb economic losses and which will succeed the landmark 2005Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), Dr. Aylward said thus far, health appears to be featuring very prominently in the current negotiations.
“This framework is very different from what we saw in Hyogo because its not just about protecting people's health but the recognition that health is at the very centre of disaster risk reduction," he said.
“Health and disaster risk reduction are deeply connected; healthy people are resilient people and resilient people recover more quickly from disasters,” continued Dr. Aylward.
West Africa's current Ebola crisis, along with Typhoon Haiyan, which wreaked havoc in the Philippine archipelago in 2013, and ongoing conflict in countries such as Syria and the Central African Republic have all made it plainly clear that health must be a central concern.
He said that WHO is uniquely placed within the UN system to ensure the new framework deals effectively with health matters.
The agency has also fast-tracked its 'hospital safety index' to be ready for launch in Sendai. This tool, explained Dr. Aylward, lays out 151 specific indicators for governments and health ministries.
Here, he noted that when Typhoon Ruby struck the Philippines last year, no medical facilities had been lost, largely because of lessons learned and measures put in place after Haiyan, which had destroyed some 600 health facilities.
“But this is about more than buildings,” Dr. Aylward said, stressing that managing disaster risk also includes ensuring entire health systems can function properly and effectively in the wake of crisis, outbreaks or pandemics.
Echoing this, Ugarte said the WHO index and similar measures aimed to address the real fact that in many cases, hospitals are lost exactly when critical services are needed.
Indeed, the experts stressed, resilient health systems can reduce underlying vulnerability, protect health facilities and services, and scale-up the response to meet the wide-ranging health needs in disasters.
Photo: UNDP/Arjan van de Merwe
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